A Week is Just Seven Days Isn't It?
by scifigrl47
Summary: When John heads overseas for a week, Sherlock's forced to fend for himself. It goes about as well as anyone could have anticipated. Which is to say, very, very poorly. Don't worry, things'll be fine in just seven days.
1. Chapter 1

**A Week is Just Seven Days (Isn't It?)**

Disclaimer: Not my property, used without permission, but with extreme respect.

**Sunday-**

** London**

Sherlock Holmes was in a foul mood when he slammed through the front door of 221B Baker St. Finding his insufferable older brother sitting in his chair, drinking tea from his mug and chatting with his flatmate did not improve his mood. The home office folders piled in on the table between them was the final straw; whatever Mycroft was up to, Sherlock wasn't interested.

"Get out," he snarled, stalking across the room.

John Watson looked up from the folder in his hands, his brows drawn low over his eyes, a disapproving look on his face. "Sherlock," he said, his tone carrying a note of censure.

"Charming, as always, dear brother." A faint smile hovered around Mycroft's lips. He pulled a pocket watch from his vest pocket and clicked it open. "You're late."

"Yes, well, I was stopped by a patrol on the tube," Sherlock said, throwing his bag at the couch. "The blasted bomb sniffing dogs made a huge fuss and it took forever to get them to release me."

"Why, exactly, did the dogs have an issue with you?" Mycroft asked, his voice pained.

"Likely chemical traces on his clothes." John was flipping through a manila folder held open on his knees. "With as much time as he spends at Bart's and the mortuary, I'm surprised that he's not declared a threat to public health."

"I'm surprised he's not declared a threat to the public health on general grounds," Mycroft said. "Still, why did the patrol stop you, Sherlock?"

"It was because I was carrying a bomb," Sherlock said, as if he was speaking to a particularly slow child.

Both Mycroft and John looked at him, Mycroft with resigned annoyance, John with dawning horror. "Or, you know, because he was carrying a bomb," John said, his voice faint. "Why were you carrying a bomb, Sherlock?"

Mycroft heaved a sigh as he stood. "Excuse me," he said, pulling his mobile from his pocket. "I imagine there are some calls I should make, preferably before the snipers are dispatched."

As soon as he was out of the way, Sherlock reclaimed his chair, slumping low. "I needed to see the design structure, and the pictures were useless. It was disarmed, so much fuss for nothing. Why is everyone such idiots?"

"Oh, I don't know," John said, going back to his file. "It's probably because most people really dislike bombs, even disarmed ones, and they really don't belong on public transport, Sherlock." He gave the bag on the couch a sideways glance. "I really don't want it in the flat, either. Get it out of here."

"It's not going to explode, and I'm not done with it yet," Sherlock said, his attention on Mycroft's cup of tea. He wanted tea, but if he got up to get it, Mycroft would take his chair again. He considered asking John, but a quick glance at John's face made it clear he wasn't amenable to the request. "Mrs. Hudson!" Sherlock bellowed.

"She's out," John said, "and bombs explode. It's rather what they do, Sherlock, no real way to redeem them of it." He looked up again. "And where did you get a bomb?"

"Evidence locker at the Yard." With a mental shrug, Sherlock picked up the teacup and took a sip. Mycroft could make himself a new mug. "Ugh, too sweet. No wonder he's so fat."

John winced. "Who let you take a disarmed bomb from the Yard's evidence locker?" he asked.

"I'll have it back before anyone realizes it's missing."

Mycroft had been just reentering the room, his mobile still in his hand. He heaved a heavy sigh and reopened it. "Excuse me," he said, his voice full of ice. "It would appear that I have additional calls to make."

"Take your time," Sherlock called after him. "What's this?" He picked up one of the folders from the table.

"Documents from a medical unit on the ground in Afghanistan," John said, flicking through the pages. "There's a rumor going around that a military unit is assisting with the illegal smuggling of human body parts out of the war zone."

Sherlock scanned the pages, his fingers flipping through them far faster than John could. "Interesting. But we're busy." He tossed the folder aside with a faint, disgusted twitch of his lips.

"You're busy," John corrected. "I am not helping you play with a bomb. A line has to be drawn somewhere, Sherlock, and I believe explosive devices that have already been disarmed is where my line is. After being an unwilling suicide bomber once, I've no interest in repeating the experience."

"Fine," Sherlock said, rolling his eyes. "I'm busy."

"Which works out well, since this was not ever intended for you," Mycroft said, returning to the room. "Go play with your toy, Lestrade will be by in an hour to collect it, so your time is limited."

"What-"

Mycroft ignored him with the ease of years of practice. "What do you think, John?"

"The numbers aren't adding up." John sighed, and leaned back in his chair, his chin in one hand. "Most of the time, the cause of death is pretty clear. What's being done here…" His voice trailed off, and he shook his head. "I don't want to think you're right, but…"

"But you think I'm right." Mycroft sat down next to the bomb without turning a lash. "How soon can you be ready to go?"

Sherlock straightened in his chair. "Wait, what-"

John glanced at the calendar pinned to the fridge. "I'll call the surgery. I'm fairly certain the leave won't be a problem, especially if you can give me anything showing that I'm doing something official for the home office."

"Easily done."

"Go, what do you mean, go?" Sherlock asked Mycroft. "John, what does he mean, go?"

John gave him a look. "Go, Sherlock. To Afghanistan." He turned his attention back to Mycroft, not seeming to realize that for all his talk about bombs, he was the one who'd set one off in the middle of the goddamn living room.

For a long moment, Sherlock just sat there, his mind awash with data, his eyes snapping between John and Mycroft as an unpleasant burning sensation built beneath his breastbone. He heard his breath hiss between his teeth, faster and faster until he made a deliberate effort to slow it down. Control. CONTROL. This was not a time to panic, or to start screaming like a five year old.

Afghanistan. John could not go to Afghanistan. Not back there. The last time he'd been there, he'd been shot. Why was he going back to a place where he'd been shot, it made no sense, why was Mycroft asking it of him, what was his angle? Why? Why John?

"Why John?" he burst out, and both men looked at him, startled.

"I'll go phone Sarah," John said, standing. "See if they can shift the schedule around for tomorrow."

"Thank you." Mycroft looked at Sherlock. "Because he has the experience to spot the parties involved, and the background that means he has a good chance of being trusted by those who are innocent. This particular issue requires a deft touch and a good deal of diplomacy, both of which he has in spades. So it was never a case for you. Luckily, unlike you," Mycroft said with a tight smile, "he does wish to serve his country, and I am more than happy to see that his time and expertise are properly compensated."

John returned. "It's fine, case load's light this week. I can be ready to go tomorrow morning, if the paperwork can be completed that quickly."

"The proper documents were drawn up before I even got in the car to come here," Mycroft said, nodding.

"Am I that predictable?" John said with a faint smile.

"No, I was hopeful." Mycroft stood and extended his hand. "I'll send over the instructions tonight by courier, and I'll arrange a car tomorrow morning. Thank you, John."

John clasped his hand for a firm shake. "I'll pack."

This was a nightmare. This was actually Sherlock's definition of a nightmare, and he couldn't seem to wake up. Sherlock was staring at them, trying not to think about the situation, trying to make his brain shut up, but his brain had never been particularly good at being silent. "I can't go," he gritted out. "I have a case."

Mycroft gave him a pitying look, but John just smiled. "It's fine, I can handle this, Sherlock."

It's fine. It's fine. No, it was not fine! What'd he mean, fine? Sherlock resisted the urge to rip his hair out. What was John thinking, he couldn't go to Afghanistan. He couldn't go without Sherlock. No, no, he couldn't go at all, this was stupid. Why was everyone such an idiot, this was a stupid idea, he couldn't go to Afghanistan.

Okay. Deep breath. Logic. Just be calm and logical and mature about this.

"You can't go," Sherlock said, the words slipping out before he could stop them.

John's smile just got a little wider, eyebrows curving up over his warm eyes. "As a matter of fact, I can. My job can give me the time, and my flatmate will be busy trying to blow himself up, so I am quite free to go."

"No," Sherlock told him.

John tipped his head to the side, a faint amount of amusement in his expression. For the most part, though, his eyes were kind and warm. "Sorry, Sherlock, but I need to do this, and you don't need me right now, so I have no reason not to go. I serve queen and crown, and I've got to pack."

"No," Sherlock repeated. "No, you don't, Mycroft-"

"Sherlock, for heaven's sake, stop acting like a child," Mycroft snapped.

Sherlock jerked to his feet, and without another word, he stormed out of the room, slamming the door to his bedroom behind him.

Sucking in breath from between clenched teeth, he turned on his heel, stalking from one end of the room to the other, his mind pouring through various plans and possibilities. He could not allow Mycroft to do this. To use John like this. It wasn't fair. It wasn't safe.

Out in the living room, he could hear the continued murmur of voices, and he scooped up a book off the bed and flung it into the wall. The bang was enough to silence the flat for a brief moment, and then they started talking again as if nothing had happened.

Snarling, Sherlock threw open the window and was out and gone.

Mycroft slid into the back seat of the black car, not surprised in the least to find Sherlock in Anthea's seat, his gaze furious. Mycroft settled himself down, arranging his case, umbrella and coat to his liking before he turned his head in Sherlock's direction. "And what have you done with my assistant?"

"She's up front. For some reason," Sherlock said, his teeth flashing in a feral sort of smile, "she decided she didn't wish to take part in this little discussion."

"Please don't bully my employees, it's uncalled for." He tapped lightly on the window separating the back seat from the front, and the car moved forward. "As well as being beneath you."

"You bully my employee all the time," Sherlock shot back.

"John is not your employee. And I do not bully him." Mycroft gave him a tight smile. "I utilize his skills, just the same as I do anyone else."

Sherlock responded to that with an undignified snort. "Call this off. Find someone else to 'utilize.'"

"No."

"You're doing this to get back at me for something," Sherlock said, his hands forming tight, brutal fists on his knees.

Mycroft's eyes fluttered shut, the movement so subtle that it would've gone unnoticed by anyone else. Sherlock missed nothing, and Mycroft knew it.

Mycroft took a deep breath, and released it as a faint, frustrated sigh. "Despite what you might choose to believe, Sherlock, not everything is about you. Sometimes, a hat is just a hat. Sometimes what you choose to perceive as a great conspiracy to control you is merely me finding the best man to do a particular job."

"Find. Someone. Else." Sherlock bit off each word with a harsh force.

"There is no one else, Sherlock. He has a unique combination of skills, background, intelligence, loyalty, discretion and compassion that means that he can do this quietly, efficiently and properly. They will talk to him, he will find out what happened, he will spare the innocent a massive scandal and see that those who acted without consideration for their fellows and their unit are brought to task for it. And he will do it with grace and efficiency.

"So you see my difficulty. I can ask a willing man, a man with rare training and intelligence, to do a sensitive job in service of his country, and risk annoying my only sibling in the process. Or, I can allow this mess to stretch out until everything is exposed by the press, good men are dragged through the mud, and the resulting scandal takes up huge amounts of both time and money that would be better spent doing something, anything, else." He tapped an index finger against his pursed lips. "Well, when I put it like that, there's almost no contest!"

Sherlock's face twisted with some unspoken emotion and for an instant, Mycroft did think his younger brother was going to take a swing at him. He stared, his expression placid, until Sherlock got himself in hand again. "Don't do this," Sherlock said, but it was a pained whisper now, as close to begging as he would get, and Mycroft steeled himself against a pang of honest sympathy.

He sighed instead, folding his hands in his lap. "Sherlock. You did quite well in taking care of yourself before he moved in; you will be just fine. It should take no more than a week, at the outside, to handle this." He paused, wondering just how far he could go into Sherlock's comfort zone before the other man panicked.

It was tiresome trying to pick his way through Sherlock's mental minefield, but if he pushed too hard, Sherlock would go straight home and get into a fight with John. And that would be the worst possible outcome to this conversation. He took a deep breath and chose his words with extreme care.

"He's taken trips before," he said, his voice calm and even. "This is not without precedent."

"This isn't a weekend jaunt to Dublin," Sherlock gritted out. "You're sending him to a place where he'll need body armor and an assault rifle."

Ah. The heart of the matter. Fear of loss. Lack of control, something that Sherlock could not bear. He could maintain the fiction, at least in his own head, that he could protect John from anything, as long as he was close by. Distance, and danger, would make Sherlock insane.

"He is not going to the front lines, Sherlock. He's no longer a soldier. He's a civilian, looking into a matter for the crown. He'll remain safely on base."

Sherlock ran a hand through his already disordered curls, and Mycroft could detect a hint of a tremor to the fingers. "Oh, yes, no one's ever been shot down going in or out of a base in a warzone. And the concept of a 'base' is severely limited in that part of the world right now."

Mycroft met his eyes without flinching. "You have two choices, Sherlock. You can accept that he is doing this with good grace and wish him well, or you can pitch a fit like a child. He is remarkably patient with you, and I do mean that in the most literal sense, the man deserves to be nominated for sainthood for putting up with your moods. But you are not his boss, you are not his spouse, and if you attempt to order him around in this manner, it will backfire."

Sherlock opened his mouth, and Mycroft held up a hand. "Do not." He took a deep breath. "Trust him enough to let him do this without fuss. Be a proper friend, a proper gentleman, and go with him to the airport to see him off. Otherwise, if you continue pouting, he'll leave anyway, but in a black mood that will not make this task any easier. You want him focused on his task, not worrying about your state of mind, Sherlock, that should be obvious even to you."

There was a moment of stillness, of silence, and then Sherlock raised one leg and kicked the panel in front of him with unrestrained violence. Mycroft didn't point out how amazingly immature that was, but judging by the way Sherlock slumped down in his seat, he knew it anyway.

When he spoke, the words were very soft, and very cold. "If anything happens to him," he said, "I will hold you fully responsible." He looked at Mycroft, and there was something dark and frightening there in his eyes.

Mycroft held his face steady with a force of will. With every outer appearance of calm, he smiled. "I will see to it that he is well protected."

"See that you do." Sherlock rapped on the panel between the front and back seats. "Stop. I'll see myself home." Without waiting for the car to come to a complete stop, he wrenched the door open and stalked off, leaving the door ajar.

Anthea slipped in, pulling it shut behind her. As soon as she did, the car began moving again. Her face was a bit paler than usual, but her expression was composed. "Orders, sir?"

Mycroft slumped back in his seat. "Make certain that we maintain a sizable protective detail on Dr. Watson, and increase Sherlock's surveillance for the duration of the situation. If he puts a foot out of line, I wish to be notified immediately."

Anthea nodded. "What constitutes 'sizable,' sir?" she asked, her fingers flying on her mobile.

Mycroft flicked a glance over his shoulder, where Sherlock had disappeared. "Treat him like royalty. Literally." He slumped down in his seat, rubbing his forehead. If this backfired on him, the fallout would be spectacular, to say the least.

**Monday: Day 1**

** London:**

John shifted his bag up higher on his shoulder. "Sherlock?" He rapped his knuckles on Sherlock's bedroom door. "My car's here, I've got to go." He paused, waiting for a response. "Sherlock?"

Nothing. He sighed. "I know you're not asleep, and I know you can hear me." He also knew that Sherlock was standing on the other side of the door, his shoulders braced against the panel. Pointing that out would be rude, though. "Okay, I'll call when I'm wheels down in country, so you know I've arrived safely. Text me, but remember the time difference; please don't wake me up to ask where Mrs. Hudson is at two am local time. Mycroft says I'll have full internet access, so send me an email if there's something more complicated you need. The surgery has my number and email, they shouldn't call here, but if they do, please remind them I'm out of town.

"There are frozen meals in the freezer, and the local take out numbers are on the fridge. Please eat. Don't forget your pot of hair is still on the stove, and it smells bad enough simmering. If the water boils out of that and I come back to a burned out mess of human hair in our best saucepan, I will not be pleased." He could almost mouth along with Sherlock, 'it's an experiment,' but he didn't. "Mrs. Hudson's going to look in on you every day, she promised, and she will tattle you out if you're smoking or indulging while I'm gone, you know she will."

He paused, and rested his forehead against the door. "Sherlock. I've got to go. Will you please come out and say good-bye?" He waited, but there was only silence. Then, from the street, the car's horn gave a polite honk, and John sighed. "I will be back in a week," he said, calm and precise about it. "If there's any delay, I'll let you know immediately. I am coming back." He felt silly saying it, of course he was coming back, but he'd learned by now that for all his deductive prowess, Sherlock did better when emotional things were made as plain as possible.

John straightened up, his fingers ghosting on the panel of the door. "I'll see you soon, Sherlock. Please take care of yourself while I'm away, all right?"

Shouldering his bag, he turned away from Sherlock's bedroom, making it all the way to the door of the flat before he heard the door open. "John?"

He glanced back, grinning. "Yes?"

Sherlock looked miserable, his face drawn up in a pout, his brows a furious line, his shoulders hunched and his arms crossed protectively in front of his body. "Be careful. Please."

It wasn't a question, in fact it was pretty close to an order, but John didn't mention it. He walked back to Sherlock and clasped Sherlock's shoulder with one hand. "Thank you. I'll be fine. Take care of London for me, all right?"

Sherlock nodded, relaxing enough to uncross his arms. "Your car's waiting."

John nodded. "I'll be back in a week," he repeated, and headed for the door, urged on by the staccato notes of the car's horn. "I'm coming, I'm coming!" he yelled, thundering down the stairs. Slipping out of the building, he handed his bag to the impatient driver and slipped into the back seat. The car had just pulled away from the curb when his mobile buzzed. He pulled it out of his pocket.

"One week. SH"

He shook his head, a faint, affectionate smile playing around his lips. He flicked off a quick response, "One week, promise. JW"

Before he could even close it, the phone buzzed again. "Do not get shot. SH." Laughing, John went to reply, and another text followed the first. "Strike that. Do not get hurt. SH." John settled back, waiting for him to run out of steam. A third text, "I'm not joking, if you get hurt, I'll be furious. SH." And a forth. "And I'll shred your passport. SH."

Laughing almost too hard to make a reply, John finally managed, "Understood on all counts. Same applies to you. JW."

Closing his mobile, he put it back in his pocket, his head going back to rest on the seat, feeling a bit better about the situation already.

**London:**

For the first day, Sherlock spent his time either staring at the ceiling, staring at the wall, torturing his violin, and tracking John's progress in his travels. He'd had plans, deliberate and carefully crafted, to make surreptitious copies of the paperwork and itinerary that Mycroft's office had delivered to John. They were elaborate plans, involving misdirection, picking of locks, getting John a little tipsy and possibly climbing up the outside of the building.

Some part of him was disappointed that Mycroft had forseen all of this, and simply given him a copy. The contents of the envelope with Sherlock's name typed precisely on the front were the same as the one that John received, with one exception. Sherlock's paperwork had a bright orange post-it note on the front that read, "Don't be an idiot about this," in Mycroft's stong, clear hand.

Sherlock had gone straight to the gas stove and lit the note on fire. John didn't seem concerned by this, or the way Sherlock snickered while he did it.

Instead, he just said, "When you're done there, could you put the kettle on?"

Sherlock had read every page in his packet, after checking to make sure it was the same as John's. Then he'd read it again, memorizing salient details and starting to process a mental map of where John would be, and when he'd be moving. When John had gone to bed, he'd pulled out his laptop and began getting everything in order.

Now he bounced back and forth between his laptop, his violin and the couch, alarms prompting him when John was due to switch planes or cross a border. With access he really should not have had, he checked airline databases, air traffic control records, weather reports and troop movements.

It wasn't until John was on a military transport, with Sherlock reading through the list of who else was on the flight, that his mobile rang. He picked it up, the movement absent. "Hello, Mycroft."

"You are going to be arrested, if you keep this up," Mycroft said, disdain heavy in his voice. "I did my best to overlook your infractions into civillian databases, but do stay out of the military ones. That boarders on treason."

"Mmmmm," Sherlock replied, not really concerned, but feeling like he should say something.

"You are not listening to a word I say, are you?" Mycroft heaved a heavy sigh. "Sherlock, for heaven's sake, do pay attention, for once in your life."

"Yes, very interesting." Sherlock frowned at a name, curious why it rang a bell, and made a mental note to check up on it when he had a spare moment.

"Do I have to cut your internet access?"

"Mmm, feel free," Sherlock said, lips quirking. Not like he hadn't made preparations for just such an eventuality. He knew how Mycroft's mind worked.

"Fine, I'll just disable John's phone, instead."

Sherlock's back snapped up, and his fingers tightened on his phone. "You wouldn't dare."

"Of course I would, Sherlock. I shouldn't enjoy doing it, in that it would cause him concern as well as make you very agitated, but I will do it. Now let it be. He's in the air, there's no further reason for you to be in the systems."

Gritting his teeth, Sherlock closed out the connections. "Fine," he groused, slumping back in his chair, his arms crossing over his chest. "You are keeping him under watch, aren't you?"

"You know I am," Mycroft soothed. "And he's keeping you updated as well. Go and do something else, something more productive with your time." Without saying good-bye, Mycroft disconnected the call.

Sherlock flipped over to his texts. There were half a dozen, all from John, every time he touched down or took off, for each delay or change of plans, he'd sent Sherlock a simple update. He opened the most recent one, for about the tenth time.

"Taking off, last leg. Need coffee and a nap. Will let you know when I'm on base. JW."

Sherlock closed his mobile. For some reason, he got the impression that this was going to be the longest week of his life.

**Afghanistan:**

Whatever Mycroft's office had sent on ahead to prepare John's way, it had raised certain expectations, expectations that John Watson knew he was incapable of filling. By the time the third high ranking officer had looked at him with a combination of consternation and outright confusion, John had found the humor in the situation.

It wasn't as if he looked all that impressive in fatigues. Short and compact, not so broad in the shoulder or long in the leg, John was well aware that he seemed like a pleasant sort of chap, but not the sort of person that came with a huge stack of paperwork signed by the permanent joint headquarters.

"Captain..." The Colonel looked at his paperwork, his brow furrowing. His brow looked like it had undergone a lot of furrowing in his career, and a faint sense of worry hovered around the man like a cloud of cologne. His ruddy skin was tanned by the desert sun and his stark, heavy features matched his broad, bull-like frame. It would be easy to write off the man as a martinet, but there was sharp intelligence in his dark green eyes and he met John's gaze with a polite, calm smile. "Watson, is it?"

John gave him a slight smile and a crisp salute. "Yes, Colonel."

The man exchanged a look of puzzlement with his aide, but recovered quickly. "Thank you for coming out, Captain. I'm Colonel Larson, this is Lieutenant Adams, my aide d' camp."

John accepted the man's extended hand. "Pleased to meet you both."

"Do you need help with your things?" Adams said with a pleasant smile. He was a striking man, a little taller than Sherlock, with nut brown skin and warm brown eyes.

"This is all I brought, thank you, though." John shouldered his bag. "I've always preferred to travel light."

"Out here, that's for the best," Col. Larson said with a faint smile. "So you'll be auditing the medical files?"

John nodded as the three of them started walking across the landing strip. "Yes. There's been some concern about medical supplies going missing. The usual things that happen in war zones," he added, with the sort of half-smile that lent his face the right amount of humility. Mycroft's assignment had come complete with a very plausible cover story. John didn't look like a detective, but an accountant, that could be believed. "Damn paper pushers. Expecting to be dealing with polite rows of numbers and not, well, reality, if you know what I mean."

Adams snorted under his breath, but Larson gave him a sideways glance. "Hopefully we'll pass muster," he said, with a faint smile in John's direction. "We've had quarters arranged for you, and work can begin tomorrow."

John stared at the sky. God, it was beautiful. It was easy to forget, since the damn country had been clawing its way through one war after another for the last couple of centuries, but damn, it was beautiful in a 'you're going to die here,' way. The mountains rose at the edge of his vision, the stark, weathered landscape as foreign as the moon. "I'm still awake," he said, his voice calm. "Might as well start now."

Adams was watching him, his eyes curious. "Not your first tour of duty here, is it?" he asked, his voice soft.

John inhaled, and the smell of swirling dust and sun baked stone touching off all sorts of memories. "No," he said, smiling back. "Left a lot of myself here." His hand gripped his left shoulder, where the ache of the old bullet wound still remained. "Blood sweat and tears, if you know what I mean."

"The definition of military service," Adams said, grin stretching out to crease his cheeks and make his eyes gleam.

"It is at that." John adjusted his helmet. "If you could lead the way?"

Adams glanced at Larson, who nodded. "This way, please, sir." As John followed him between the buildings, he glanced over. "You're a doctor, then?"

"Yes," John said, glancing around, matching the lay of the land with the maps that Mycroft had provided. "There must be quite a few of those around here."

Adams nodded. "Not as many as we'd like, actually," he said, with a shrug. "Just had a changeover of personnel, we're stretched thin. Usually, we'd give you a liaison with more medical experience, but I'm sorry, we just don't have anyone to spare. Corporal Cooper will be assisting you, just let him know what you need, but he may or may not be able to answer much about supply use or requisitions."

Wasn't that interesting? Of course, it could be true, but it presented some interesting challenges. Might also make thing easier. John gave him a polite smile. "Oh, I'm sure I'll muddle through," he said. After all, he had six days.

**Tuesday, Day 2**

** London:**

Why was there no milk in this fridge?

Sherlock braced his hands against the sides of the fridge, glaring at the contents with all the force his brain and eyes could produce. He threw in a full body lean for impact. "John, why didn't you get-"

He glanced over his shoulder at the empty flat, and there was a curious sensation in his chest. He didn't really want to think about it all that much. It seemed familiar, but it wasn't. It shouldn't have been. He didn't remember feeling like this.

Did he?

He realized, a little too late, that his hand was rubbing at his breastbone, above the empty, aching sensation. He dropped it to his side, and just as a matter of course, he slammed the fridge door shut.

Stalking across the room, he dumped the tea out, and then retreated to the living room to throw himself onto the couch. His dressing gown fluttering around him, he curled himself into a ball and folded his arms in front of his chest to stare at the back of the couch.

It wasn't particularly interesting.

With nothing better to do, he considered the unpleasant sensation that still seemed to be lingering under in his chest. Indigestion? Maybe. Or maybe he was just hungry. That would seem to be more of a stomach feeling, though, and he'd recognize hunger, wouldn't he? He'd been hungry.

After all, before John, he'd often forgotten to eat for days on end. If he was lucky, he'd remember before he passed out.

Sherlock pursed his lips. He did not miss that at all. Most people had their university blackouts because of booze. Sherlock just passed out in the library. A lot. Sometimes he'd end up in some obscure stack and just lie there until someone found him.

To this day, the sound of shrieking librarians was a hidden phobia.

Okay, so, eating something would probably be good. Tea. Except there wasn't any milk, was there, he'd just had this discussion, just between himself and with the uncaring, unproviding fridge, and there had been no resolution. Just the fridge telling him to go to hell.

And there was that curious, unexplained ache again. It had to be hunger. He considered making something to eat. Or at least a cup of tea.

Tea would be god.

He jerked his head over his shoulder. "John, I'm-"

The flat was still empty.

And there was that ache again.

There was a polite tap on the door, and before he could respond, Mrs. Hudson popped her head in. "Good morning, Sherlock, dear. How're you feeling today?"

Sherlock stopped rubbing his chest, and gave her a random grumble by way of a reply. She was used to his moods, at least to the point that his lack of intelligible reply didn't really bother her. "Oh, now, you can't laze about all day," she said, heading for the kitchen and setting the kettle.

"I don't see why not," Sherlock grumbled. "It's not as if I have anything better to do."

"Now, now, dear, there's no point in being all pouty." She came over and patted him on the head with a light hand. Sherlock, not interested in being placated, swatted her hand away, making her laugh. "If you wanted to, you could clean up the mess on the stove," she pointed out. "That's like to rot, and then the bin collectors will be up to argue with you about biohazardous waste again."

"I don't put anything truly hazardous in the bins, and if it bothers you so, you can deal with it," Sherlock said, kicking his legs out along the length of the couch.

Mrs. Hudson made a clicking sound under her breath. "Not your housekeeper, dear. Now, up you go, let's have a cuppa and you can get your day off to a good start, don't you agree?"

Sherlock's eyes narrowed. "Do you have milk?"

"Oh, sorry, Sherlock, no. I'm out. Don't take it so much myself anymore, the dairy does bad things to my digestion, you know that." She patted his shoulder. "I've got non-dairy creamer, I'll go get some."

Sherlock made a terrified face at the couch cushions. "No, thank you."

"To the creamer, dear?"

"To the tea." He sat up, not because he wanted to, but because it was clear that she wasn't going to budge from his flat until he got up. "Well, thank you so much for stopping by," he said, rolling to his feet so fast that she took an involuntary step back. "It was wonderful to see you, now, off you go, I've got so much to do, busy, busy, no time to chat."

Putting a hand on her back, he steered her towards the door with big, swift steps. "So, so nice to see you, really, we must do this again some time." Throwing the door open, he gave her a tight lipped grin and waved her out.

"Oh, all right," she said, with a sniff. "I'll stop by again at supper, Sherlock."

Inwardly, Sherlock cursed. Biting his tongue, he managed to keep his smile on his face with a force of will. "Wonderful," he said, and he hoped it sounded pleasant instead of bitter.

She smiled at him, and patted him on the chest with a light hand. "It's normal to feel lonely, Sherlock. Don't be concerned about that."

Sherlock froze. "What?" he asked, blinking down at her.

"Well, without John around, you're obviously going to be at loose ends," she said, her smile only growing wider. "It's normal to feel lonely."

Her hand fell away, and without thinking, Sherlock's hand came up to touch the same spot, where that empty, aching feeling was back. "I don't get lonely," he said, spitting out the last word as if it was poisonous.

"Of course you don't, dear." Mrs. Hudson gave him a smile that seemed, well, pitying, and Sherlock resisted the urge to slam the door in her face. "It'll be fine, Sherlock. He'll be back in just a couple of days."

"Yes," Sherlock said, and just like that, she was gone. He shut the door and stood there, staring at the closed panel. Then he leaned forward and rested his forehead against the wood. "I'm not _lonely_," he snarled, "I'm just hungry."

The kettle pinged, and Sherlock spun on his heel. "I just need a cup of tea," he corrected himself.

Even if there was no milk. Pulling his mobile out of his dressing robe pocket, he started to type.

** Afghanistan:**

"Can I get you anything else, sir?"

John glanced up from the newest stack of folders that had been placed in front of him. "No, Corporal, thank you." He leaned back in his chair and stretched, feeling the muscles of his back burn as he shifted position. Okay, that should be a sign. He stood, rubbing a hand over his tired eyes. "How many more are there?"

"About a hundred," Corp. William Cooper said, his tone apologetic. He was a short, broadly built young man with a full crop of freckles across his nose and high cheekbones and a shock of strawberry blond hair. He had a pleasant demeanor and was efficient in his work, which had made John's job so much easier.

John groaned at the news, and Cooper struggled to hide a grin. "Yeah, the hope of a paperless war hasn't really touched us out here." He shifted. "Would you like a cup of tea, sir?"

"That'd be fantastic, thank you. Grab one for yourself, too, I think we both need a break."

"Be right back, sir."

As the cheerful young man disappeared through the tent flap, John paced the length of the makeshift headquarters, stretching his arms over his head as he moved his legs. Rolling his head on his shoulders, he let out a sigh.

The tent and masonry set up of the semi-permanent base was more comfortable than the field, that was for sure, and he didn't mind the military sameness of it all, the neat and practical table and chairs, filing cabinets and wire covered lights. It was a pleasant enough place to work, and they'd been left to it. There was always the clatter of rotors or gusts of wind outside, and the sound of boots in the halls, tense voices or joking ones, bits of gossip flying fast outside the windows.

For now, however, the paperwork was telling a convincing story only because John knew right where to look. He rubbed his forehead, wanting to move on, but incapable of not gathering as much evidence as he could. Efficiency warred with Sherlock's annoyed voice in the back of his head, and as always, Sherlock won.

Trying to solve a case without adequate data, John could almost hear him say, was just plain idiotic.

He was smiling to himself when Cooper stepped back in carrying a tray. Two mugs of tea, a plate of biscuits and sugar and creamer were balanced carefully on one hand. John grinned at him. "You get stuck waiting tables a lot, don't you?"

Cooper laughed. "Actually waited tables before I joined up," he said. "I kept at it enough for me to realize that I didn't want to do it for the rest of my life."

"Thank you," John said, accepting the mug with a sigh of relief. The tea was dark, strong, and just a bit on the bitter side, and damn, it tasted so good. After a couple of sips, he sat back down and reached for some creamer.

On the table, his mobile buzzed. It was a common sound by now, it had been rattling its little electronic brains out for the past couple of hours, and Cooper, taking a seat across from him, opened his mouth. He closed it without saying anything, hiding behind his mug instead.

Curious, John arched an eyebrow in the young man's direction. "What?" he asked, with an easy smile.

Cooper's eyes shot up, and a faint bit of pink showed up on his ears. "Nothing, sir."

John's grin just got wider. "Oh, c'mon now, none of that. We're having a cuppa, what were you going to say?"

Cooper studied him, hazel eyes sharp, and seemed to come to a decision. "You know you can set your mobile to just alert you once for an incoming message, don't you?"

John frowned, his brows pulling in as he tried to make sense of that. "Yes, it's-" The phone buzzed again, and he figured it out. "Oh, oh, no. No, that's what it's doing. Every time it's doing that, it's a new message." He started laughing. "No, I can see why you'd think that it's on 'bother me until I look at the message', but no."

Judging by the look of relief that flashed across Cooper's face, he was glad John hadn't take offense. Then he looked down at the mobile. "You get a lot of texts, then."

"I have a flatmate with an unlimited data and texting plan and a lot of time on his hands," John said.

"They're all from one person?" Cooper's voice rose up about an octave, and catching himself, he cleared his throat. "Sorry, I mean, that's... That's a lot of texts. I figured you had a very jealous girlfriend or something."

"You have no idea," John said, his tone wry. "There might be one or two in there from someone else, but for the most part, yes. There's probably a couple dozen from him, because he finds them convenient."

Admittedly, this was more than he'd usually be sending, but John got the feeling that the man might be feeling a little frustrated. Not that he'd ever admit it, but whenever John was out of the flat for more than a few hours, the texts did seem to pick up to an almost alarming pace.

He glanced up and found Cooper staring at him with the expression of a man who didn't know if he was being lied to or not. John grinned. "Go ahead, take a look if you don't believe me."

Cooper gave him a look, clearly wondering if this was a trap, and John's grin only got wider. "I'm serious. go ahead. His texts are by turns hysterical and terrifying."

"

Terrifying?"

"

He does police work," John said, stretching the truth just so that he didn't have to explain Sherlock's real job description. "So it'll either be about the contents of the cupboard, or a picture of a maggot infested foot with a dozen smileys dancing around on the screen."

"

Now I know you're making this up." Still, Cooper reached for John's mobile.

"

What makes him cheerful isn't necessarially what would amuse the rest of us," John explained. He took a sip of his tea. "And trust me, I've learned not to have anything in my mouth when I check his messages."

Cooper was scrolling through the messages, his brows drawn up tight. "There are nine messages in a row that just say, 'We need milk,'" he said.

"

Yeah, he does that sometimes," John said, grinning. "I'm not sure if he's trying to harass me, if he forgets he's sent the other messages, or if he gets stuck in a recurrent loop. You know, send text, take a sip of tea, check microscope, send text, tea, microscope, text..." 

"

Is he demented?"

"

Brilliant and insane, possibly," John agreed. "Not so much for social niceties."

Cooper flinched. "Ah, there-" He swallowed, his face drawing up in a wince. "There are the maggots. Dear God, that's a lot of damn maggots. Wait, is this in a fridge?"

"

Probably," John said with a sigh. "I'm not there, and I'm usually the only thing that stands between our fridge and biological contamination. It'll be a free-for-all until I get back and explain that jars of fingers do not belong next to the mayonnaise."

"

You're messing with me," Cooper said, but he was still going through the texts.

"

Our flat is not Safe-Serv certified, let's put it that way."

"

Isn't that dangerous? I mean, it's just asking to get something infectious."

"

He has a startlingly strong constitution. I've never seen him sick, not so much as a sniffle." John stopped, arrested by the thought. "Jesus, that's a terrifying thought. Sherlock with the flu." He shuddered. "No, we'll be skipping that."

Cooper laughed. "Do you have a plan as to how you'll be skipping it?"

"

Well, hell, at this point, you owe me a favor, right? I can hide here with you. I'd prefer a war zone to Sherlock with a fever." He looked at Cooper, trying to keep a straight face, and the young man was rubbing his mouth, as if deep in thought, but his eyes were dancing. As one, the two of them burst out laughing.

"

He sounds like a character," Cooper said. "But be serious, that is not your fridge, is it?"

"

Seriously, I once got home to find a human head in the crisper drawer."

"

You're lying."

"

Yeah, it was on the top shelf."

That set them both off into gales of laughter again, John bent over double as he struggled to draw breath between bouts of the giggles. When he finally got himself back under control, he sat up, leaning back against the table, his elbows braced on the wood, eyes wet as he stared at the ceiling. 

"

Can I ask, why do you live with him?"

John picked up his tea and took a sip. "Because it's never boring," he said after a moment's thought. "Because he's my best friend, for all that he's a constant thorn in my side."

"

Yeah, but that doesn't mean you have to live with him."

"

Well, some people chase tornadoes. Some people research tsunamis. Some people hunt escaped fugitives. Some people start wars in the middle east. I live with Sherlock Holmes. We've all got something in common."

"

You're all mental?" Cooper said.**  
**  
"I was going to say suicidal tendencies, but that works too." Grinning, John saluted him with his mug. "Get back to work."

"

Yes, sir." Cooper stood, just as the phone started vibrating again. He looked down at the incoming text. "Sir?"

"

Yeah?" John reached for the stack of folders.

"

You're out of milk."

"

So I've heard." John shook his head. "Do me a favor, Corporal." Snagging a piece of paper, he wrote down their address, and the address of the nearest Tesco's. "Text him back with directions between these two locations."

"

He doesn't know where to go?"

"

Oh, he does, but sometimes, it's just more fun to be snarky." John stabbed a finger in his direction. "Google that for him, please."

"

Yes, sir." Grinning, Cooper did as he was ordered, and John went back to his paperwork, shaking his head.**  
**


	2. Chapter 2

**Wednesday, Day 3**

** London**

The knocking wouldn't stop.

Gritting his teeth, Sherlock willed the sound away, but it persisted, growing ever more urgent. Of course, his attempts to ignore his phone hadn't worked, either, because it was still goddamn ringing.

"Sherlock?" Lestrade's familiar, and annoying, voice was now accompanying the knocking. "Mrs. Hudson says you're in there, and I've got a case."

His brain tried to rouse at 'case,' but failed. "Go away!" Sherlock yelled, frustrated beyond coping.

There was a minute's pause, and then the door opened. "Didn't you hear me?" "Lestrade's footfalls were heavy and plodding, just like the man himself, Sherlock thought with a touch of childish bitterness. "I said I have a-" The footsteps stopped. "Why are you lying on the floor?"

Sherlock glared up at the face hanging upside down above him. "It's my floor," he snapped out. "I can lie on it if I want to, and it's really not any of your business, is it?" His voice was getting more staccato, more tense with each word. "Unless it's now illegal to lie on the floor. Is that why you're here? Because it's illegal to lie on the floor, or do you just like to bother me?"

"Do you have a nicotine patch on your forehead?" Lestrade asked, somewhere between amusement and concern.

"It's my forehead and my- OW!" he yelled as Lestrade crouched down and yanked it off. "That HURT, you bloody-"

"Watch it," Lestrade said with a cheeky grin. "What, does John have afternoon office hours today or something? He'll strangle you if you're abusing these things again, you know that, Sherlock."

Sherlock shoved himself to his feet, rubbing his forehead with one hand. "John," he said with precise dignity, "is out of the country."

"Oh, he's on holiday? That's nice, isn't it?" A muscle twitched next to Lestrade's eye, but he held his smile. "When'll he be back?"

"It's not a holiday, Mycroft sent him to a war zone. In bloody Afghanistan," Sherlock gritted out, not really pleased by the bitterness in his voice.

"Well, that'd explain the general alert that went out," Lestrade muttered. "Wish he'd tell us these things, who has to deal with it? Me, that's who."

"Ha!" Sherlock stabbed a finger in his direction. "I knew it! I knew you were taking orders from him!"

"Jesus, Sherlock, everyone takes orders from him," Lestrade said, his voice pitying. "Now are you going to come take a look at a locked door burglary, or are you going to sit on your floor and contemplate the myriad fascinations of ceiling?"

"It depends," Sherlock shot back. "Will you be staying either way?"

"No, I've got a fascinating case," Lestrade pulled his notebook out of his pocket. "Locked museum, missing art, top quality security system, multiple guards, one now unconscious for unknown reasons..." He tapped the pad with his pen. "Just a mess. I don't know how we're going to-"

"Shut up, shut up, shut up!" Sherlock yelled, rolling to his feet and stalking over to grab his coat. "I'm coming, Just for the love of God, please stop talking. I cannot possibly handle listening to your prattle any longer."

"I'm going to tell John that you were mean to me," Lestrade said, his amused grin stretching across his face.

"You know, I liked you a lot more more when you were properly differential," Sherlock told him glaring.

"That was before we became such great friends," Lestrade was clearly enjoying this. "Before I realized that you need me as much as I need you. Also that you're an annoying git."

"Shut up."

"Right-o," Greg said with a grin.

**London:**

"Hello, freak," Sally said, giving Sherlock a sideways look. "Where's your sidekick?"

Sherlock's teeth ground together. "Hello, Sally. You really should pay your credit card bill on time, and what have you made a mess of this time?"

She rolled her eyes, her upper lip drawing back. "Seriously. Where's Watson? He finally get sick of you?"

Sherlock's shoulders hunched, and behind him, Lestrade snapped, "Enough, Donovan. Go make sure that we've got the employees under control.

"Sir-"

"Don't kick the bee's nest, Donovan. I know it feels good when you do it, when you see it go sailing like a proper football, but when you end up with a mouthful of bees, and go into anaphylactic shock, it's not so much fun, is it?"

Donovan gave him a look. "Sir, have you been drinking on duty?"

He patted her shoulder. "Not a drop. Go. Get statements. Go, go, go." He nudged her along. "Lay off Holmes today, his handler's MIA, and he is off the leash. You won't enjoy it."

"I think I-" She met Sherlock's eyes over Lestrade's shoulder, and whatever she saw there was enough to make her shut her mouth with a click. "Fine." Flicking her hair back, she stomped away.

Lestrade rolled his eyes. "Ya know, I shouldn't have to treat you lot like my children."

Sherlock gave him a baleful glance. "She doesn't bother me."

Lestrade hitched a shoulder up. "You're a little brittle at the moment, Sherlock. Let's just keep the two of you apart for now, shall we? Best for all involved." He tucked his hands in his trouser pockets, leading the way through the small lobby. "It makes the civilians nervous when the two of you start howling at one another, and half the people here have already started crying on me." He sighed. "Not the easiest group to deal with."

"I will not be responsible for my actions if someone attempts to weep on me," Sherlock said. "I have mace. I will use it."

"Mace and pepper spray are illegal, Sherlock."

"My own personal formula. Legal as sea salt." He gave Lestrade a sunny smile.

"Oh, that's just great. I do not want to deal with trying to figure that out, so..." he paused. "Just... Don't go near anyone, please."

"Wonderful, we can agree that's best for all concerned." Sherlock glanced around. The museum was small, a converted building not really suited for the task, but the security system seemed admirable for the space. "Private collection, I take it?"

"Yes. One of those 'dying bigwigs wanted to stick it to his grandchildren but still resented giving anything away, even if he was dying' things," Lestrade said as they ducked through the metal detectors. They whined at Lestrade, and he ignored the minor annoyance. "So he used their inheritance to build this place to house his collections. Mostly Russian and Asian art and artifacts."

"What's missing?"

"Russian Icon, painting on wood with gold leaf. Six by nine inches. Believed to be from the 15th century, worth enough to have both the head of security and the curator in tears." Lestrade lead the way up the stairs, an Sherlock moved around a stack of packing crates.

"That's it?"

"It's enough. The doors and windows are alarmed and computerized, none of them were opened between the start of the night shift and when the crime was discovered this morning. Guard was unconscious on the back stairwell, but no sign of an attacker."

"Blunt trauma?"

"No, no injuries that the hospital has found, yet. They think it's chemical, but they're having problems pinning down what it was. He's still out."

Sherlock nodded. "Museum has been closed down for today, then?"

"They're always closed on Wednesday, skeleton staff and changeover day, I guess. When they do restoration and cleaning, and switch the exhibits."

Reaching the second floor landing, Sherlock snagged a brochure from the holder below the map an scanned it, then the posted map. Frowning, just a bit, he tucked it in his pocket. "Was this exhibit scheduled to change or move?"

"No, the Russian stuff stays on display all the time, they've got a grant to keep it as an educational outreach by some Russian corporation." Lestrade shoved the doors to the gallery open. "This way."

Anderson was dusting for prints, his face screwing up like he was sucking on a lemon the instant he saw Sherlock. Sherlock resisted the double impulse to make a face at him or just smirk. He settled for pretending the annoyance wasn't there.

"Sir, I am registering my-"

"Anderson, go talk to Donovan about the bees."

"The what?"

"Bees." He held up a hand when Anderson opened his mouth. "No, I haven't been drinking, go ask Donovan about it."

Sherlock stared at the gallery. It was a relatively small space, more an extended hall than a true room. He glanced up at the ceiling, taking note of the three cameras and the two doors, one on each end. A single spot was empty on the wall.

A thin, fragile looking woman in a fashionable black suit was sitting on folding stool, staring at the blank spot. Her shoulders held at a painful angle, her thin neck bent beneath the weight of her head. Her jewelry was subtle, but expensive, her shoes polished with care, every dark hair neat in her precise bun.

Museum curator, Russian emigre, mid-fifties, left handed, recovering alcoholic, from money but a generation or more removed from the source, and sleeping with one of her staffers.

Not the thief. Sherlock dismissed her as unimportant.

"Do the guards walk regular rounds?" Sherlock said, turning his attention back to the cameras, stepping to the left, then the right. He looked at the blank spot and then down at the baseboards.

"Yes." Lestrade handed over a printed page. "They walk in opposite directions, and keep to the same route, but trade off regularly so they don't get complacent. They need to hit regular check in points. None were missed until the time when the unconscious guard went missing."

"Was the missing painting discovered before or after that?"

The woman spun around in her seat, pinning Sherlock with a brutal glare. "It is not a painting," she hissed. "It is an icon. A religious relic."

Sherlock glanced at her. "It's paint on wood. It's a painting." Dismissing her, he looked back at the hall, pacing off the space.

"Sherlock, this is Dr. Svetlana Baskov, the curator. Dr. Baskov, Sherlock Holmes."

Sherlock nodded in a distracted way, not really listening or caring all that much. He had his mobile out and was flicking through information as rapidly as he could, sorting through the info with ease. He found what he was looking for a moment later and put his phone away. "How much of this floor is modular?" he asked Baskov.

"Almost all of it," she said, "but I don't see-"

"I know." He raised his hand and rapped against the wall, moving down the row, staring at each icon as he passed, tapping with a light touch here and there. He paused, eyes narrowing, in front of on icon, and turned his head to the side, then leaned his ear against the wall, staring at the painting from the side.

His knuckles rapped on the all, and he retreated, crossing the room and trying again, the same pattern, over and over. Done at last, he leaned back.

"I don't understand," Anderson said, and his voice was very loud in the sudden silence. "Did he get dumped?"

There was a moment of stillness, and then Lestrade groaned. Sherlock, his whole body drawn up as tight as a bowstring, swiveled on his heel. He stared at Anderson, his eyes narrowed to bright blue slits, his lips pulling back from bared teeth. "Anderson," he said, his voice soft. "How long have you been here?"

Anderson's nose came up. "I don't see as how that's any of your business," he huffed.

"Four and a half hours." Sherlock smiled at him, and it wasn't a pleasant expression. "Or if you'd prefer I be precised, four hours and twenty-two minutes." He held out a hand towards Lestrade. "You are carrying a knife. I need it."

"How'd you-"

Sherlock's eyes flicked towards the ceiling. "You set off the metal detector, you're not carrying your gun and I am carrying keys and change and didn't set off the detector. Give it."

Shrugging, Lestrade handed it over.

It was small, almost a penknife. Still, it would do. Walking over to a particularly bland version of an icon of Madonna and Child, Sherlock took it off the wall and flipped it over to check the wood panel. Without another word, he turned it sideways in his hand, and ignoring Svetlana's shriek, slammed the wood down into the seam of the heavy frame. With a twist, he ripped the frame apart, splintering wood and finding an hidden seam of painted glue.

"Are you INSANE?" Dr. Baskov screamed.

Sherlock rolled his eyes and pried the frame free, revealing a second wooden panel hidden below the first. While the visible icon was a poor example of the craft, bland and unremarkable, the one he'd revealed was a stunning work of pristine color and gold leaf, nearly glowing in the fluorescent lights.

"The icon never left?" Lestrade asked, eyebrows arching.

Sherlock opened his mouth, shut it. "You know what?" he gritted out at last. "I cannot even be bothered to explain. I don't care. I really don't." Because John was the only one who really listened. Half the fun of explaining things, as of late, had been watching John follow his train of thought, sharp eyes over that amused mouth, appreciation dawning on his face like the sun rising. Sherlock stared at Anderson. Not an adequate replacement.

He had a brief vision of living with Anderson, and shuddered, his whole body twitching. Not an adequate replacement at all.

"But," Dr. Baskov said, staring at the icon in her hand, "this isn't the missing one."

"I know," Sherlock said, "but I figured you'd want that one, too." He snapped the knife shut and tossed it to Lestrade, who caught it with a snap of his wrist. Sherlock stalked forward, his whole body angled, his strides long and loose. Anderson, seemingly against his will, rocked back a step, trying to get out of the way, and bumped against the wall. "Dusting for prints?" Sherlock said, eyes wide and innocent.

Anderson clutched his kit to his chest. "Yes. Proper scientific-"

"Do shut up now, your voice is like fingernails on the chalkboard of my life." He walked past Anderson, out the door, into the next gallery, where a stack of packing crates was leaning up against the wall. He picked up the crowbar that was leaning against the stack and walked back into the hall.

Everyone was exactly where he'd left them. Without another word, he took the crowbar in both hands, brought it up and swung it, hard and fast, into the wall. Dr. Baskov screamed, Lestrade groaned, and Anderson took off running. The wall cracked like glass, and Sherlock reshouldered the crowbar, reaching into the hole he'd just made in the sliding curtain wall.

He pulled out a small package wrapped in white fabric, and stomped over to Dr. Baskov. "The unconscious guard is your thief, check the fusebox in the basement and you'll find his fingerprints on the flipped fuse for the next gallery." He slapped the package into her fingers and turned on his heel. "Syringe he used to inject himself is probably crushed in one of the interior sharps containers in the bathroom."

Pausing in front of Anderson, Sherlock checked his phone. "Hmmm. Seems I accomplished in 5 minutes what you didn't have a chance to do in five hours." His lips pulled up in a tight smile. "As usual. And this was boring. Staggeringly boring. I would've been better off lying on my floor and staring at my ceiling because then, at least, you would not be there!"

He handed the crowbar to Anderson and stalked towards the door. "And I didn't get DUMPED. My brother sent him to Afghanistan!"

"How's those bees taste?" Lestrade asked Anderson. "Not so good, I assume. Kind of like burning, maybe? Taste like death? Like pennies in the back of your throat?" He patted Anderson on the back. "You got off light. Keep it in mind."

"How was that light?" Anderson snapped back.

"He had a bloody crowbar, Anderson! You do the math!"

"Math isn't his strong point!" Sherlock yelled back over his shoulder as he stomped out the door. "Of course, I don't know what his strong point IS, but I could give you chapter and verse on what it ISN'T."

It took thirty seven texts, sent in rapid succession as Sherlock stalked out towards the front door, to let John know just some of the things that Anderson was not good at. He could've sent more, but he was almost to the street when he put his mobile away.

"Sir? Mr. Holmes?"

Sherlock glanced back up the stairwell, over his shoulder. Dr. Baskov was clutching the icons as she leaned over the bannister. "Thank you," she said, with a smile. "Really. It means so much. I-" She teared up, and Sherlock winced.

And John's voice in the back of his brain said, 'Say you're welcome, Sherlock.'

"You're welcome." He managed a tight smile.

She sniffed, rubbing at her eyes with the back of one wrist. "Thank you. Thank you, and, don't worry. I'm sure if you just hold out, your brother will come around to your relationship."

"Why the hell did I leave the flat?" Sherlock asked no one in particular.

"Excuse me?"

"Not talking to you!" He yanked his scarf off, then put it back on, frustrated and annoyed all at once.

"If there's anything I can do for you, please, just name it."

Sherlock stopped, almost at the front lobby. He looked back over his shoulder, eyes narrowed into blue-grey slits. "Yes. Yes there is. Where is your employee break room?"

"Excuse me?"

"The break room," he repeated, a bit impatient. "Where is it?"

"Oh, um, just this way." She waved him back up the stairs, waiting until he caught up before she lead the way through a side gallery and past a door marked, "Employees Only." At the end of the corridor, a small break room overlooked the back of the museum.

Sherlock spied the fridge and headed straight for it. Success. Milk. He turned. "I am taking this milk as payment," he told Dr. Baskov, relieved.

"It's expired," she said, blinking up at him.

For a long moment, he just stared at her. "Bloody hell," he mumbled under his breath. "I'm going to have to go to the store, aren't I?"

**Afghanistan:**

Now, these were not the files he'd asked for. They, might, however, be just the ones he'd been looking for.

John frowned, just a tiny bit, at the half a dozen folders that had turned up in the middle of his most recent stack. They weren't... Ducking his head, he started flipping through, his heartbeat accelerating. Now, wasn't this interesting?

He glanced up, but Cooper was on the other side of the room, his back to John, working on compiling some of the data John had given him. John took a deep breath, and looked down again.

There was no doubt in his mind that Cooper had given these to him. The question was, why.

"Corporal?"

Cooper glanced over his shoulder at John. "Sir?"

"What's your primary job around here? Are you medical corps?" John knew he wasn't, but certain suspicions were beginning to bloom in his head.

"No, sir, I'm just a glorified paper pusher, when I'm not on the front lines," Cooper said with a faint smile. "We never have the right number of personnel to handle the grunt level stuff, so..." He shrugged. "I'm good at it, so whenever they need a hand, and I'm not in the field, I get the overflow, you know, the stuff that's not urgent. The stuff that they just let sit around for a while, you know what I mean."

"Yeah, I do." John studied the file that was open in front of him. It was personnel listings. Who was assigned where, transfers and reassignments. He'd begun to figure out the when and the where, and Cooper had just given him an easy way to figure out the who.

Cooper knew something was going on.

Either he'd hidden that very well, and his superiors didn't think he'd had enough access, often enough, to draw the conclusions that he clearly had, or he'd been assigned to John specifically so he could pass on what he knew.

John tapped his pen against the table, a staccato beat. He would've arrived at the same conclusion sooner or later, he would've been able to cross reference things from the database, but with one 'misplaced' file, Cooper had just made his life much easier. Considering that, John shut the file and put another on top with an idle flick of his wrist.

"Cooper." He gestured the young man over. He came to his feet and crossed over to stand beside John, his expression questioning. John turned the page in front of him over. "Could you help me with this?" he asked, tapping the line item in question.

Nodding, Cooper took it. "This?" he asked, studying the page. It was a rather substantial amount of refrigerated supplies that had been marked as express, and not part of the regular shipment. Cooper glanced up and met John's eyes.

"I'm looking for this kind of shipment." John kept his voice light. "If you can help me go through the files."

Cooper nodded. "Of course." He grabbed his chair and pulled it over, taking a seat on the far side of John's table. He picked up the first stack of folders, just as John's mobile buzzed. His head came up, a smile curving the edges of his lips.

"Yeah, he's at it again," John said, reaching down to pick up his laptop case. Mycroft had provided him with something that looked like a cross between a laptop sleeve and a diplomatic pouch, but he was pretty sure that the damn thing was lined with kevlar, and braced against crush or drop damage. The laptop had also been pre-loaded with all sorts of details, details that weren't matching up with Cooper's paperwork.

"Milk again, sir?"

John took a moment to reach out and check the most recent round of texts. "Disaster," he said, rubbing his hand over his chin, trying to hide a smile. "The local mortuary slash medical school got in a corpse with something that looks like bubonic plague and they won't let him take tissue samples."

"Bubonic plague?" Cooper gave him a horrified look.

"There's still small packets of it out there. Probably a traveler who ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time, but I'm glad that for once, bits of him will not be in my fridge."

"If I lived with him, I'd need therapy."

"You say that like I don't have a therapist." John paused, considering. "Of course, she refuses to discuss him."

"Your therapist refuses to discuss the main reason why you need therapy?" Cooper asked, lips twitching. He made a notation on the calendar pages that they'd laid out, showing movements of the shipments between units, and between the central drop points. "Doubled here, on these weeks," he pointed out to John, who took the invoices and flipped them, back and forth, studying the contents, looking for rush notations.

"Yeah," John said, his tone absent. "Oh, yes. Or rather, no. She says I'm in a self-destructive spiral and have made the rational choice to involve myself in an unhealthy relationship, and while she'll discuss the reasons why I make these choices, she will not discuss him."

"It's therapy, aren't they kind of required to listen to whatever you want to talk about?" Cooper asked, chuckling. He took the pages back from John, noting the circled items, and without saying anything, went to work looking for similar quantities of similar items. He'd figured out, very quickly, not to verbalize anything, if it could be avoided. "I mean, if you want to talk about your dog for an hour, you're paying, right?"

"Her contention is that there's no point in discussing Sherlock because he's not going to change, and I'm not going to move out." John nodded at his paperwork. His suspicions looked correct. Someone was hiding things in mismatched boxes, and getting someone else to sign off on the shipment that didn't include the phantom supplies. He checked the unit details and reached for the appropriate stack of folders.

"You could try couples therapy," Cooper said, chuckling.

"Watch it," John said, handing over a file and getting three pieces of yellow paper back, clearly the middle part of a triplicate form. "We did, and it was a miserable failure."

"You went to couples therapy with your flatmate?" Cooper said, turning in his chair to stare at John, eyes dancing.

"It seemed like a good idea at the time." John managed to keep a straight face for about thirty seconds. "No, no it seemed like a horrible idea. But at the time, my therapist was insistent. That lasted all of one session."

"He refused to go?"

"Oh, he went cheerfully. That alone should've made me suspicious, but I thought it was a good sign, you know, wanting to grow, all that rot. He went, and he made my therapist cry."

"I thought they were supposed to be able to, you know, not do that," Cooper said. His fingers were flicking through the pages, and he located another two canary yellow sheets, and handed them over to John. "Don't they get special training so that their patients aren't able to get under their skin?"

John wasn't surprised to note that the shipments were exactly the same. Irregular, at the least, outright fraudulent at the worst. "In her defense, if Sherlock wants to make you cry, you are going to cry. He has a special talent for that. He doesn't utilize it often, most of the time, he's just inept with dealing with other people, but it was the worst failure of a therapy session you will ever see."

"I don't think I'm old enough to hear this."

"No, in retrospect, it's pretty funny. I didn't think so at the time, of course, because it's like something out of Dante. The sixth circle of hell, but with a co-pay."

Cooper choked on his tea. "Jesus, sir."

John kept his eyes on the paperwork, reaching for the notations he'd made about shifts and signatures. "I mean, I knew I'd made a mistake the instant the door closed, there's Sherlock, lying on the couch, because he's insistent, that's how therapy works. If you're not lying down, it's ineffective, and I'm telling him that he's getting therapy confused with New Yorker cartoons from the 1980's, and my therapist, who really is a lovely woman, very calming, is writing, because that's what she does.

"Except Sherlock starts talking, and I can tell, with a glance at her face, that he's saying exactly, down to the word, what she's just written, despite the fact that he's lying, facing in the other direction, with his eyes closed. She's used to me reading her paperwork upside down, but this, this is genuinely creepy."

He paused for a sip of tea. "That sort of thing is the reason why he's been hit in the face with holy water six times that I know of." He stopped, considering. "And that one unauthorized baptism, but I don't think that counts when someone dumps the baptismal font on you against your will."

Cooper's whole body was shaking, silent, he was trying to hide it, trying to stay upright, but he glanced at John, looking for a lie, and not finding it, he went into gales of laughter. "You are making this up," he accused.

John held up a hand in approved Boy Scout posture. "I swear, I am not. So, back to therapy, couples therapy, mind, and I'm about an inch away from rolling up a newspaper and smacking him in the head with it, because he's just doing this to be annoying, I can tell by the way he's smirking. And she's pretending that she's not bothered, but she's clicking her pen, over and over, and I want to say, 'he can smell fear, really, he's like a wombat-"

"A wombat? Are they actually threatening?"

"I have no idea, I babble when I'm trying to head off the complete collapse of civil human interaction, it's a bit of a character flaw. And I know, I just know, he's hearing that pen, because his smile is just getting wider and wider, just terrifying levels of 'I've got your number, as well as the square root of your number and I stole your calculator while you weren't looking.'"

John switched the folders around and handed Cooper a map, tapping a marked X on one front. Cooper nodded, still chuckling.

"And that's when I realized," John said, leaning back in his chair and reaching for his laptop. "That he was, um, lying down, like that, with his eyes closed, because he was handicapping himself. He was playing this game in his head, trying to get what he wanted, which was, of course, a complete flaming breakdown, using nothing more than sound and his first glance at the room and what he already knew about her."

"Is there a reason why he wanted her to, um, have a complete breakdown?" Cooper asked, curious now as he went about his work. He was having no problems following the conversation as he flicked through the files.

"Good question." John considered that. "Honestly, I always thought that it was because he doesn't think she's a very good therapist. I like her, she's easy to talk to, and most of the time I feel better after, but he thinks she misdiagnoses me."

"He's a trained therapist?"

John choked on nothing at all. "Jesus, no. No, oh, God, no, that would be the worst idea ever, I am not kidding about that. Wow." He paused, thinking about it, and couldn't hold back a giggle. "All of his appointments would be five minutes long and end with him yelling at people that they're morons who have made a mess of their lives."

"Give him points for efficiency," Cooper pointed out.

"That's true. He could definitely see a lot of patients. Of course, instead of helping them, he'd just add fear of authority, paranoia and trauma to their issues." John pulled up the official spreadsheets of supply distribution. He wasn't surprised that the physical paper copies showed different amounts than the computer records. Not by much, and by numbers that were easily misread or reversed, but still. The notations weren't matching up.

"So he's got his eyes closed," Cooper encouraged.

"Really, you want more of this story? Really, Cooper? You are an absolute masochist, you know that?" John put the pages that were mismatched aside. He'd scan them in later. "So I'm sitting there, and I can see the train wreck coming, but I do not know how to stop it, because my therapist is still certain that she's got this under control, so Sherlock says something snippy, and I tell him to shut it, and she says it's okay, it's good to get these things out.**  
**

"So I mean, what can I do about that? I'm looking at her, thinking, and you think _I'm_in a self-destructive spiral, lady, but okay, you want to swim in the deep end, not much I can do about it." John shrugged. "I lean back, cross my arms, and look at my watch."

"You were timing him?" Cooper gave him a mock horrified look.

"It was either that or leave, and that would've been worse." John flipped the folder shut and checked the cover. He handed it to Cooper. "So she asks Sherlock why he feels the need to dissect other people, and he asks her why she feels the need to impose her opinions on others, and she says, 'well, because it's my job to help people' and he goes, 'well, I don't get paid, but I'm better at it than you, so what does that say about the current state of the economy?'"

Cooper snorted on a laugh.

"And it got worse from there," John said. "I tried to block most of it out, but there was stuff about her dog, and the fact that she hated her boyfriend's bird, and a potassium imbalance and something about a failing grade in a freshman level class at Uni because she was too drunk to go to class and in Sherlock's opinion, that was the reason why the rest of her diagnostic skills were so weak, because she was missing that framework and she should've known better than to indulge in Jagerbombs during finals week."

Cooper was staring at him now, pen hovering over his pages, and John shrugged, eyes dancing. "You're making this up," he said.

"Not a word, stop accusing me of lying, or I'll have you brought up on charges." John grinned as he reached for his tea. "So it's seventeen minutes in, and Sherlock is on a roll, just brutal, and I'm looking around for something to hit him with, because this is not funny anymore, but the only things in the room are these huge psych textbooks. And before I can, there's this tiny little sniff, just one, just barely audible. She's got her head down over her pad, and she's stopped clicking her pen, and I just stand up, say thank you to her, toss Sherlock's coat and scarf on top of him, and tell him we're done.

"And he's all smirky, like, ha, victory, until we get outside of the office, and then I"m like, 'wonderful, I'm going to have to find a new therapist, thank you for ruining this, like you ruin everything, you're a horrible person.'" He paused. "That's the condensed version, of course, the real version was longer and had way more swears and involved me flailing on a public thoroughfare like a drug addict while screaming."

He paused. "Not my proudest moment, now that I think about it."**  
**

"Did he live through it?" Cooper asked, restacking his files.

"Yes."

"So not your worst moment, either, huh, sir?"

John burst out laughing. "That's a good way to think about it."

"But you've still got the same therapist?"

"I made another appointment, an by some unspoken pact, neither of us ever spoke of it again. That's really all I can ask of her." His phone vibrated, and he reached for it. "And now what are you up to?"

He flipped through the newest round of texts. Rolling his eyes, he replied, "Not in the rice cooker, Sherlock. JW."

"You know what I think?" Cooper asked, handing John a note.

"What?"

"That he doesn't like that there's someone out there that you talk to more than him," Cooper said, grinning.

John stared at him. "Be serious."

"I am! C'mon, think about it. You wouldn't be going to your therapist unless you were talking to her, and that means you're telling her things. Maybe they're things you're not telling him. He doesn't know." Cooper turned in his chair. "Some people just can't deal with wondering what they don't know." He paused. "Yeah, that made more sense in my head."

John considered that. "Cooper, you just may be onto something. When you leave Her Majesty's employ, maybe you should look into getting your therapy credentials yourself."

"Am I allowed to bring my gun?"

"Who's gonna tell you no?" The phone buzzed again, and John picked it up. "Oh, for Pete's sake..."

He texted back, "No, Sherlock, not in the drier, either."

**Thursday, Day 4**

** Afghanistan:**

"Good morning, sir."

John paused in the door of his workroom, cup of coffee in one hand, laptop case under his other arm. "Hello," he said cautiously, adding a smile to take the sting out of it. The young man came to his feet as John walked in, unfolding to his full lanky length. He had a sergeant's stripes on his shoulder and a military bearing. "Can I help you, Sergeant?"

"No, sir," the young man said, without smiling back. "I'm Sergeant Robert Moldea. I've been assigned to assist you."

"Nice to meet you, Sergeant, but I've got all the help I need." John glanced at the stack of files on the table, not surprised that he could see, even from here, that his work had been disturbed. "Corporal Cooper has been very helpful, I really can get on just fine with his assistance."

Moldea didn't react to that. "I've been assigned to replace Corp. Cooper," he said, at parade rest.

John stared at him, just for a moment, meeting Moldea's dark eyes. "Is that so," he said, setting his mug down on the edge of the table. "On whose orders?"

That caught Moldea off-guard, enough to startle a blink out of him. "Sir?"

John tipped his head to the side. "On whose orders?" he repeated. "Who gave you your orders, Sergeant?"

He blinked, his eyes sliding from John's. "Col. Larson, sir."

"I see. Thank you, but I won't be needing you." John gestured to the door. "I'd like you to step outside, Sergeant. My work here is in a particular order, and I'd hate for it to get disordered while you were trying to assist me."

"Sir-"

"Step outside, Sergeant Moldea, that's an order."

Left with no choice, Moldea preceded him out of the room. He stopped just outside. "Sir, I was assigned to stay here with you."

"That's fine, you can remain here until I clarify some things with your commanding officer. As long as you remain outside, and don't disturb my work." With a tight smile, John headed down the corridor.

It didn't take long to locate Col. Larson's office, and his aide took one look at him and decided to check the Colonel's schedule for a free moment. John encouraged him to find a free moment right now.

In under five minutes, he was being escorted into Larson's office. The man looked up from what appeared to be a stack of maps showing troop movements. "Good morning, Captain Watson. What can I do for you?"

"My assistant has been reassigned," John said, coming to rest in front of Larson's desk. "I'd like him back."

Larson came to his feet, slowly and easily. "Corp. Cooper was assigned to you because at the time, we didn't have anyone more versed in the supply requisition and distribution network," he explained, his voice holding a note of annoyance. "Now we do. Sergeant Moldea will be of more use to you."

"I've had no issues with Corp. Cooper's work," John said, with a tight lipped smile. "And he's now used to how I work, and what I expect of him. He's smart and efficient and I work well with him. I'm more than halfway through the time I've been allotted for this task, and I have no intention of starting over with a new assistant."

"Captain, this is really for the best."

John's head tipped to the side as Larson leaned forward, placing his huge hands on the desk. "I'm sorry, sir, I'm just trying to be clear. If I'm not mistaken, my paperwork explained that you were to extend me every courtesy, provided it did not affect the running of your unit.

"Now, with that in mind, are you refusing my simple request to keep the assistant that I'm comfortable working with?"

Larson's eyes were black slits in his weathered face, and his nostrils flared as he sucked in a deep breath. "If you think it's necessary," he said, his voice icy.

"I do," John said, with a tight smile.

"As you'd like, Captain." Larson lowered himself back into his desk chair. "Let Sergeant Moldea know that he can return to his usual duties."

"Thank you, Col." John gave him a quick nod. "I'll make sure that my superiors know just how accommodating you've been."

"I'm sure you will, Captain." Larson watched him leave and to John, that gaze was like a physical pressure between his shoulder blades.

Crossing the base, John made a beeline for the mess hall. It didn't take long for him to spot Cooper, sitting with half a dozen other young men at one of the long tables. He had body armor on and a helmet on the bench next to him, and he was bent over his morning meal, his face expressionless as he poked his food.

John cut through the room, ignoring the curious looks that made it clear that he'd become the topic of gossip over the past few days. Two of Cooper's dining companions, a thin redhead and a calm looking man with skin like dark chocolate, looked up as John paused at the table. John gave them a nod. "Cooper, you're late for work."

Cooper's head snapped up as all of the men stood. He scrambled up. "Uh, no, sorry, Captain Watson, I've been reassigned."

"Yes, and I had you re-reassigned. You're with me. Feel free to bring your breakfast, but we've got work to do." He nodded at the others, and one of them, a dark haired man with a complicated tattoo that was visible under the sleeve of his t-shirt, seemed to be struggling not to laugh.

Cooper just stared at him. "Sir?"

John raised an eyebrow. "I had you reassigned after your reassignment. Try to keep up, Corporal. Let's go" He gave a polite nod to the rest of the men and swung by the coffee urns to grab a fresh cup, letting Cooper get his things in order. It didn't take long, Cooper was behind him a minute later, having dumped his tray. Nodding at him, John handed him a cup of coffee and headed out. He waited until they were walking through the open space in the center of the base before he spoke, using his coffee cup to cover his mouth.

"Who pulled you?" he asked, under his breath.

Cooper's eyes slid to the side. "Col. Larson," he said, just as quiet.

"Why?"

Cooper shrugged. "He didn't say, and I didn't ask, sir."

John nodded. "The folders you gave me yesterday. Why?"

Cooper was as close as he could get without it looking odd. "I thought you should see them." His head was down, and he was studying the contents of his cup as if it was completely fascinating. He swallowed, and his shoulders pulled tight. "Was I wrong, sir?"

"No." John smiled at a passing Lieutenant. "I'm going to give you a contact number. If anything happens, anything at all, you can put in a call. We'll make sure that nothing happens to you. Do you understand?" He took a drink from his coffee cup.

"Yes, sir."

"You don't believe me?" John asked, grinning at him.

"I believe you mean it, sir."

"We can work with that." They reached the building where they had been doing their work, and John lead the way down the corridor. He wasn't surprised to find Moldea still standing, his back against the wall, waiting. "Thank you, Sergeant," John said, coming up to him. "You're dismissed. I cleared everything with Col. Larson."

Moldea looked like he wanted to argue, but he just nodded. "Thank you, sir." He gave Cooper a sideways look as he strode off. John waited until he was out of sight before he slipped in the door. He could feel Cooper's tense form behind him as he took in the disordered work.

"Cleaning crew did a lousy job in here," he said, and it was trying to be a joke, but when John looked over at him, he saw the pallor behind the young man's freckles. Cooper looked at him with slightly panicked eyes.

John leaned his laptop sleeve on the table and unzipped it, tilting it just enough for Cooper to see the edges of the files he'd tucked in there, along with the laptop, the night before. He gave Cooper a slight smile. "Luckily," he said as he watched the tension drain out of the young man, "I live with a messy flatmate. Anything important, I make sure it's somewhere safe." He zipped the case back up as Cooper all but collapsed into a chair.

"Now, where were we, Corporal?"

** London:**

"But that wasn't the price on the sign."

Sherlock gritted his teeth, feeling a muscle twitch beside his left eye. He reached up and pressed his fingers against it, taking a deep breath. All he wanted was a pint of milk. That was all. Milk. Simple. Easy. He had exact change. He'd torn himself away from his experiment because he was sick of opening the fridge and seeing the empty carton and shutting it again.

No matter how many times he checked, it was still empty. And he'd caught himself yelling for John three times. The feeling of pathetic moping wasn't one he wanted to acknowledge, but there it was.

Milk. A bloody pint of bloody milk, that was all he wanted, all he needed, how was he still standing here, staring into space, wishing he could light this woman on fire with his mind? Oh, how he wished he could light this woman on fire with his mind.

The girl behind the register was repeating, for the sixth time by Sherlock's count, "No, ma'am, that price was for the 12 oz package. This is the 16 oz package." She seemed to have unlimited patience, or she'd been lobotomized. It was hard to say.

Sherlock considered moving to another line, but the way his day was going, he would only end up with a fresh, new hell. At least he understood this one.

"No, that's NOT what the sign said." The woman tapped the package of frozen peas, which was now well on its way to mush. "I want to speak to your manager, this is false advertising."

Sherlock stared at her, stymied. He looked down at his milk. Why was he still here? And at what point was it acceptable to just... Throw his money in the air and make a run for the door? He could almost hear John's voice in the back of his head, chiding, 'Never. I have to shop here, Sherlock, so behave.'

He sighed. Maybe he could stop on his way home and buy a bottle of scotch. A big one.

The girl at the register had waved over a tired, stoop-shouldered man in a pink and yellow polka dot bow tie and a blue blazer. It wasn't the sort of ensemble that really inspired confidence on Sherlock's part, but the the woman latched onto him. "This is false advertising," she said, her voice rising to a painful pitch. Sherlock winced as the woman launched into an explanation of the situation. Sherlock tuned her out, categorizing the candy bars by the register by price, by content, by color, by maker in his head, just to have something to do.

As if he was used to this sort of thing, the balding manager pulled a walkie-talkie off of his hip and said, "Justin, are you in frozen foods?"

A moment of delay, then a crackled response. "Yes."

"Could you grab the sign off of the third case on the left and bring it up front?" the manager said, with a pleasant smile at the shopper.

Pause. "The pizza one?"

"No, the veggie one."

Sherlock resisted the urge to slam his head off of the checkout counter. There was not a big enough bottle of alcohol in the world.

"Okay, sure. On my way."

It took another few minutes for the teenaged boy to reach the registers, carrying a piece of yellow and blue paperboard. The manager took it, glanced at it, and held it out to the woman. "The sale price," he explained, his voice kind but firm, "is in the 12 oz bag. Not the 16 oz bag."

She stared at the sign, her lips pursed. "That is not the sign that was on the cooler case before," she said, with a firm nod, and Sherlock gave up on patience, social pretense and John's continued ability to do their shopping here.

"Get out of the way."

She glanced at him, blinking in shock. Then, as if realizing she had an audience, she drew herself up, her cheeks puffing, her eyes narrowing. "I beg your pardon," she snapped.

"As well you should. You are in the way," Sherlock said, setting his milk on the counter with careful precision. "Just the milk," he told the girl behind the register, who was staring at him with wide, startled eyes.

"I haven't finished my transaction," the other shopper squawked at him, and Sherlock turned on her.

"Yes, you have. You just haven't acknowledged that you have. You see, things cost money. It's unpleasant, I understand, but things have prices. You have two choices here, madam, you can pay the price that the item costs, or you can leave without purchasing it. They-" Sherlock waved a hand at the assorted employees that were now gathered around, "have told you what the item costs. Your continued harping on what you, in some state of delusion, believe the item SHOULD cost, has little to no bearing on reality!"

He leaned in. "Pay. Or get out of my way."

In the background, someone laughed, and it was a strange counterpoint to the muzak that was going in an infinite loop of auditory hell, and the silence that had fallen all around them. The woman's eyes slid from one side to the other, her cheeks taking on a mottled pink quality of frustration or embarrassment, Sherlock wasn't sure, and he didn't care.

"Don't you try to intimidate me," she snapped at him.

"You are amazingly stupid, and I need to buy milk."

"How DARE you," she hissed out.

"Oh, I'd dare much more." Sherlock leaned a hand on the counter. "You have two children, both girls, or an unhealthy addiction to Disney Princess fruit snacks, could be either." He gave her a disdainful glance. "Could be both."

"You have a job in an office, probably an accountant specializing in either audits or tax prep judging by the fact that your grocery list is written on the back of a discarded bookkeeping page, and you hate it, judging by the sheer amount of stolen office supplies in your purse, seriously, who steals whole boxes of pens? There's also red ink below your right ear, meaning you're right handed, and you tuck your pen behind your ear when you're working, which means you're stealing whole boxes of cheap pens, which is both stupid and pathetic.

"You're on a diet based on your lousy disposition as well as the obvious orange cast to the palms of your hands; please keep in mind you cannot replace every meal with carrot sticks, and the nicotine stains on your fingertips mean that you're mixing huge doses of beta caratine with a serious two pack a day habit, so you're risking a intracerebral hemorrhage, lay off the carrots, it's not worth it. Your diet's not going well based on the fact that you ate an entire packet of HobNobs in the third aisle, the container's in your jacket pocket and there's crumbs on your lapel, and I do hope you were planning on paying for those."

"Mostly," Sherlock said, leaning in, eyes narrowed and teeth bared, "I know that you are annoying me and I would like to buy my milk. You are impeding me from doing that, so I am curious, why are we still here?"

Now the muzak was playing on its merry way alone in the silence, and the woman's face was a very unhealthy red color. No one in the other lines moved, no one spoke, and Sherlock stared the woman down. "How much is the difference in the price?" he asked, his voice soft.

The girl at the register cleared her throat. "Thirty pence," she said, and Sherlock lost it.

**"**You are wasting everyone's time over less than a half quid?" he said, his voice rising to dangerous levels. "I am standing here, losing life, losing braincells, bloody bored out of my mind while you squabble over thirty bloody pence?" Fumbling in his coat pocket, he pulled out a pound coin and slapped it on the counter. "Here. MAY WE GET ON WITH OUR LIVES NOW?"

The stock boy snorted on a laugh, and Sherlock turned a gimlet look on him, only to find that the boy had, at some point, pointed a camera phone in his direction. Sherlock raised an eyebrow. "That is just-" he managed before the woman slammed a loaf of bread off the side of his face.

Startled, he looked at her. "There's no call for-"

With a shriek, she lunged at him, swinging the loaf like a club, and the bread wrapper gave way with the force of an explosion.

**Afghanistan:**

"Well?" John asked as Cooper stared at the text.

"It's from someone named Lestrade? DI Lestrade?"

"Oh, that can't be good." John looked up from his postmortem examination. "What's it say?"

"S. arrested, YouTube link included. Something about milk? Lestrade.'" Cooper looked up. "That's gotta be a joke. Right?"

"Doubtful." John sighed through his mask. "Play it." He leaned down low, considering the surgical work on the abdomen. He ran the edge of his forceps across the sutures, neat and precise. Someone did good work.

"Are you mad?" Cooper said, eyebrows sky high. "Do you have any idea what that kind of data transfer will cost you out here?"

"I know someone who can fix that sort of thing," John said, grinning. "And let's not pretend that you're not curious."

"Oh, God, I am, I mean, what kind of YouTube video ends up with a man arrested for milk?" Cooper was still staring at the text as if it held far greater meaning, as if he could determine something just by studying the placement of the letters.

John finished up his examination, zipped up the body bag, and peeled off one glove, reaching out to flick the link.

"Really, this is stupid," Cooper said, taking a seat, staring at the screen as the video loaded. John, grinning, stepped up behind him, leaning against the wall.

He watched in half horror, half amusement as Sherlock berated some poor woman that got between him and his rightful milk purchase. When she slammed a loaf of bread into the side of his head, John choked on a laugh. She was still shrieking and wielding the sadly crushed and ripped bread bag when the police came running in, and Sherlock had moved on to berating the store manager, his shoulders and head covered in bread crumbs and chunks of crust.

Through the speaker, the sound was tinny and uneven, as if the person filming was trying to hide, though from the police, the manager, or Sherlock himself, it was impossible to say. "This is rubbish!" Sherlock was yelling, and it was enough to confuse the police, because they'd clearly never dealt with Sherlock, John knew it was tough the first time to figure out that he was just an overly loud bystander and not the threat.

"The blond stock boy in the cereal aisle is stealing beer, and the girl on the sixth register can't count worth a damn, so even though you do think she's stealing, she's not, she's just dumber than the average employee, and her drawer is going to be off at least sixteen pounds a shift, the crisp vendor in the blue and black uniform is changing the expiration dates on the product, and you should stock a better selection of pasta sauce, you're losing a 1.3% profit margin, what with your pasta-"

At this point, the police and the manager and Sherlock were all circling each other and Sherlock was only getting louder, his frustration with the situation mingling with what John strongly suspected was a lack of food and probably a lack of sleep. John groaned, one hand on his forehead, wanting to not look, to block his view, but it was like watching a car accident in progress, he just couldn't look away.

"Fine!" Sherlock was yelling. He fished a fistful of coins from his pocket and all but threw them in the air, stalking for the door, bottle of milk clamped under his arm like a rugby ball, and he was just LEAVING, and for some reason, the girl at the counter was the only one who didn't seem bothered or terrified by the whole thing. She just rang up Sherlock's milk and counted out the change on the counter.

"You're three pence short, sir," she called.

Sherlock paused, giving her a look, but he was reaching in his pocket, and it was too late, some overzealous officer, shaking off his confusion to figure out, yes, he knew how to deal with a shoplifter. And if Sherlock was a shoplifter, then he knew how to handle that, finally he knew what to do.

He probably didn't need to tackle Sherlock, but John didn't really blame him. Of course, one he moved, so did the other two officers, like, oh, thank god, someone knows what to do here.

The milk hit the wall and went in all directions, and Sherlock's voice came from under the pile of officers. "THIS IS WHY I DON'T GO GROCERY SHOPPING."

The video ended, and John stared down at the phone. He took a deep breath. "That," he said to Cooper, "that pretty much is why he doesn't go grocery shopping." He sighed, rubbing a hand over his face. "Jesus, I'm going to have to find a different store. I will never be able to go back in there again."

"What the fuck did I just watch?" Cooper asked, staring at the screen, blinking. "This is a put-on, isn't it?"

"I really wish that was the case," John said on a sigh. He checked the hits on the video and groaned. "Oh, wonderful, it's gone viral."

"I cannot imagine why," Cooper said with a straight face. "That was brilliant. Absolutely loony, of course, but brilliant."

"Sorry, I need to use this." John sighed as he took the mobile from Cooper's hand. "The fact that Lestrade texted me means that it's already been handled, but still, I'd like to check."

"Does this happen often?"

"Not really. I mean, I blame you."

Cooper blinked at him. "Sir?"

"Well, you are the one who gave him directions to Tesco's..." Grinning, John leaned against the sinks as he sent a quick reply.

"Sir, that is just uncalled for." Shaking his head, Cooper tried hide a smile. "Can you sign off on these?" He handed the paperwork over to John, who paused for a second to sign the documents. "Thanks. I'll get them to Lieutenant Adams."

"Mmm." John finished his text and sent it off.

'You have my bank account info. Savings account marked bail. Let me know if he gets mandatory jail time. JW'

"Captain?"

John looked up, and tucked his phone in his pocket. "Ah, Lt. Adams, did Cooper find you?"

"No, I must've just missed him." Adams paused in the doorway. "Did you find what you were looking for?"

"Yes, thank you." John stripped off his surgical gown. "Thanks for allowing me access."

Adams looked around, his expression blank. "Your clearance is all access. I admit, though, I wasn't expecting your request." His lips quirked up. "Most people do their best to stay out of here."

"It's not my favorite location, I'll admit, but I needed to check on some things. I appreciate your discretion."

"This isn't about missing supplies, is it?" Adams asked.

John's pocket was vibrating, and he pulled it out. "I'm sorry, Lieutenant, but it's not something I can discuss." Checking the text, he added. "By the way, thank you for assigning Corp. Cooper to me. It's proved to be quite... Invaluable."

He glanced up, and met Adams' eyes. "I'm glad to hear it, sir," Adams said, his face expressionless. "Corp Cooper's a reliable soldier. A true asset to his unit."

"I am getting that impression." John nodded. "I'm sorry, give me a second." When Adams gave him a nod, he reread Lestrade's text.

'Mycroft's been by to pick him up. Didn't look happy. Will keep you appraised. Lestrade.'

John typed back, 'Thanks, please try to keep him away from the magistrate. It won't go well. JH."

And to Sherlock, he sent, 'We will discuss this when I get home. JW.'

Putting it away, he smiled at Adams. "Sorry about that."

"Gotta keep headquarters up to date," Adams said.

"Yes, I'm not looking forward to the paperwork that's going to be waiting for me when I get back," John said, smoothly. He spent so much time with the damn thing, it wasn't surprising that people would think he was doing something other than reminding Sherlock where the replacement light bulbs were.

For the sixth time. If he had to read one more snarky text about keeping the hard drive clean, he was not going to be responsible for his actions.

"I'm not even looking forward to the paperwork on my own desk," Adams said. "But I'm here to see if you'd like to take a break for a meal. Col. Larson would like you to join us."

Wasn't that interesting? John gave him a nod. "Thank you." His phone vibrated, and falling into step behind Adams, he checked it.

'We need milk. SH'

End chapter 2


	3. Chapter 3

**Friday, Day 5:**

** Afghanistan**

There was a pounding on the door, and John jerked awake. A glance at his watch made it clear that it was very early morning, far too early to be awake. But there was the sound of rotors echoing through the darkness, and feet in the hallway. Another knock on the door. "Captain Watson?"

John rolled out of bed, scrubbing his hands over his face. "Come in," he called, checking to make sure that his shorts and t-shirt were in place. As the door opened, he was already grabbing his pants. "What's going on?"

The young man in the doorway looked strained, and there was a splash of blood across his tan shirt, down to his camo pants. "Sir, we've got incoming wounded. A lot, and we're understaffed. Lt. Adams wants to know if you can scrub in."

John jammed his feet into his boots, yanking his overshirt off the end of the bed frame. "I'm on my way." He flipped his pillow up and grabbed the laptop case, and fell into step behind him. "What's happened?"

"A couple of units encountered heavy resistance, we've got small arms and rifle wounds, and a couple of vehicles were hit by IEDs," he said, and as soon as he was sure that John was up to speed, he sped up, running full out. John kept pace with him, dodging through the moving crowds.

They were waiting for him in medical unit, the nurses and aides ready to get him suited, scrubbed, and in place. They fed him a constant flow of low priority cases, minor patchwork and damage control, and John knew that he was being used for the grunt work, leaving the critical cases for the regular medical staff. It made sense, they didn't know him, and they didn't know his work, and it left the people they did know were qualified open to deal with the difficult patients.

On some level, it was very much like being back in the surgery, but with fewer feverish nine year olds and more shrapnel. Still, it was good to be useful.

Mid morning, he asked after Cooper, and was told, after some investigation on the part of the aide, that his unit was out in the field. That was all John was able to find out, and he glanced at the packed laptop, tucked away in the bottom of his instrument cart, where he could keep an eye on it.

But there was more wounded, and more after that, and John pushed his questions to the back of his mind, focusing on his work, on the steady flow of patients. When the flow finally trickled down to the point where John was able to devote some time to stitching up a minor scalp wound on a cheerful young Scot, who insisted on checking out John's handiwork with a hand mirror. Chortling at the neat row of black thread marching across the right side of his head, he'd smacked John on the back and declared him to be an excellent seamstress.

John had decided to take that as a compliment.

There was no patient after that one, and John was just lowering himself to a stool, stripping off his gloves, when someone slipped up behind him.

"Captain Watson?" The young man had red hair and a strained face, tall and slim, and he looked familiar. "Captain Watson, sir, I'm Royce Warren. I need your help; it's Corp. Cooper."

"What's going on?" Watson found his feet, his eyes flicking over the unhappy looking sergeant. He had been siting next to Cooper at the breakfast table, that's where John knew him from. "What's happened?"

"Our unit got hit. IED, we got some of them back, but he's still out there, and we're out of medics." His face was white, and he slipped into place beside John. "We've had some injuries, I don't-"

"How far?" John snapped out.

"A couple of miles outside of base, but I can't move him, Dorrinson and Murphey are with him, but we need actual medical help."

"Get me a bag." John jerked around, and grabbed the laptop from his cart before heading back for his room. "Red Cross, non-combatant, I need my gear." Heart pounding, he took off running. It took him a matter of minutes to get back to his bunk, and it was still too long, far too long, and he grabbed his body armor, his helmet, securing everything with a firm grip and pulling his extra jacket on over it, and it was second nature, even after so long, to snap everything in place.

He flipped the laptop open on the bed and hit a sequence of keys, uploading everything, everything he'd found, everything he knew, a hard info dump. Locking the laptop, locking the bag, he used the attached cord to secure it to the metal bed frame, and jammed it under the mattress. It wouldn't keep it safe for long if someone was really looking for it, but he couldn't bring it with him.

It wasn't safe.

Digging through his bag, he grabbed the last of his items. This could work. Please, God, John thought, let this work.

Warren looked up as John reached the Humvee. He gave John a tense nod, and handed John a medical bag and an armband to identify himself as medical personnel. John dropped the bag at his feet as he fastened on the medical identification, and Warren moved around the vehicle to the driver's side. Leaning over, John opened the bag, checking the contents, before zipping it back up and opening the passenger side door.

John looked at Warren. "How far?" he asked, fishing out his mobile and checking the time. Warren's eyes followed his, but he put the vehicle in gear.

"We'll be there in ten minutes, sir." Sliding into the driver's seat, he glanced at John. "Buckle up. Ready?"

"Let's go," John snapped his seat belt in place, keeping his mobile out and working,

The ride was fast, disorienting and tense. When they finally came to a stop, it was to put the Humvee behind the cover of a rock formation. John was still on his mobile, but as they stopped, he clicked send and slipped it in his pocket. Swallowing hard, he slipped out of the vehicle. Without another word, Warren started moving away from the vehicle, weaving through a rocky path to a secure location out of sight from the road.

Cooper was still breathing. The relief was overwhelming, and John sank to his knees beside the young man. His medical bag slid off of his shoulder, hitting the ground next to Cooper's arm with a thump and a kick of dust. John unzipped pockets, one after another, a little dizzy with relief and fury as he found gloves and dragged them on.

Cooper's side was soaked through with blood, despite the efforts that had been taken to pack and bind the wound, and his face was pale. He was also alone. He jerked when John leaned over him, his eyes flashing open, panic and pain there until he was able to focus on John's face. "Hello, Corporal," John said, his voice even as he shifted Cooper's clothing out of the way. Removing his helmet, he crouched down, peeling the blood soaked fabric away from the wound. "Got into a bit of a scuffle, did we?"

Cooper's mouth worked, and his tongue flicked out to moisten dry lips. "Get... Out of here," he gritted out, his voice raw. "He's-"

"Oh, I know." John didn't look up from Cooper, probing at the injury. Mentally, he cursed. The shrapnel had impacted just below the edge of the body armor, a weak spot in the side, but the blood flow had slowed, it was sluggish now, and there was no scent of putrification that would indicate that the bowels were hit. "He's wearing a goddamn name patch, Cooper, and I did read the personnel files. And the fact that of the 17 questionable shipments, his signature was on 15 of them. I also read the part of the files that showed his emergency contact is Col. Larson."

He looked up at Warren, who was white faced now, eyes darting. "Your uncle, if I'm not mistaken. My report's already been sent, Sergeant. There's no way to stop it." He pulled his mobile out of his pocket, and wasn't surprised in the least when Warren leveled a pistol at him. John shook his head. "The authorities have all the data. Stand down."

Warren's face twisted. "You're lying. There wasn't time." He sucked in a breath, and John realized he was going off of instinct and panic, never something good to see in a kidnapper. "Give me your phone."

John handed it over, watching dispassionately as Warren dropped the mobile to the ground and stomped on it, hard. The case cracked and the electronic innards shattered with a second strike of the boot heel. He gave a faint smile. "That's not going to change anything. Stand down."

"Get up, we're going."

"Where?" John went back to work on Cooper, putting pressure on the wound to slow the bleeding. Cooper hissed at the pain, but didn't fight it, his head snapping back against the ground, his gritted teeth bared. "It's just you and me and Cooper, and I won't let him die, and you can't shoot me. That's not something you can explain away. People are going to notice if there's a bullet in me." John reached for a gauze pad, ripping it open with his teeth. "So again, where do you think we're going?"

"Away from here." Warren's voice rose. "We're going to put you and him in the Humvee and take you into the mountains. I don't need to shoot you, there's other ways to get rid of bodies in this godforsaken country, ones that don't leave evidence. Get up!"

"There's no way to kill someone that doesn't leave evidence." John checked Cooper's eyes, his pulse, his breathing, rapid fire, vitals the only thing that was important for a moment. "You were at his table, the day I came and got him. He's from your unit. For God's sake, you know him, and you're doing this?"

"This is your last warning," Warren said. "Get up."

"Your uncle won't be able to cover this up," John said, ripping open a pre-prepped syringe of painkiller. "He has to suspect what you're doing, Col. Larson, doesn't he? He's let you get away with this so far, but he cannot cover this up, Warren. This isn't property crime or smuggling or illegal trade in human organs, this is murder."

"Only," Warren said, his voice soft, "if I get caught."

John looked up, and the gun went off, and he felt the impact through his whole body, throwing him back into the rock wall, he felt his head smack into the unyielding stone and then there was nothing.

**London:**

This might've been a miscalculation.

Sherlock stared down at his hands, his lips pursed. He glanced at the bunsen burner. He studied the layout of petri dishes. Yes. Slight miscalculation.

"MRS. HUDSON!" he bellowed. There was no response, and he gritted his teeth. "Oh, fine," he mumbled. "You come and check on me every single day, and today, of all days, you're going to pull a disappearing act?"

So taking his experiment out of Bart's hadn't been the best idea he'd ever had. In his defense, Molly had been exceptionally annoying today. Usually, he could tune her out, but for some reason, she'd been trying to discuss her mother's cat with him, and to avoid saying that he cared neither for her mother nor the cat, he'd packed everything up, made some half-hearted excuse about needing a controlled environment and left.

It had taken him half an hour to find a cab willing to take him. It probably had something to do with the radioactive warning symbol on the side of the box he was carrying. London cabbies had become squeamish at some point in the last ten years, and he did not appreciate it.

His mistake with the first one was, of course, that he'd tried to explain that even a half hour cab trip wouldn't expose the man to any significant radiation. Then there had been a ten minute argument about what construed 'significant.'

As it turned out, the rest of the world might hold a different definition of this than he did. The things that one learned when one had no choice but to talk to people.

He could not wait for John to get back so he didn't have to do that any more.

Lips tight, he glanced around. Phone was on the table, and he could hit speed dial. But who to call? Lestrade would let it go to voice mail at this time of night, and Mrs. Hudson, if she hadn't come running wasn't around and wouldn't be able to get here, Mycroft... His upper lip curled in a disdainful snarl. He'd prefer to wait for John to get back rather than call Mycroft.

It would appear that he'd have to get creative.

** London:**

"I don't know, Mr. Holmes." The boy hugged his paper bag of take out as if it was a lifeline. "I'm not supposed to talk to you."

Sherlock stared at him, stymied. "I'm not asking you to talk to me," he snapped. "In fact, I'd much prefer you didn't talk to me. I find it tedious. What I need you to do is come over here and hold this in place so that I can secure it without losing hours worth of work." The tower of glassware tipped to a precarious point, and he nudged it back, resisting the urge to scream at the kid.

The teenager was painfully thin, tall and lanky with a beak of a nose that managed to be balanced by his big, dark eyes and heavy brows. Those eyebrows were now drawn up tight. "Have you been sitting like that since you called the shop?" he asked.

"Thirty-seven minutes," Sherlock gritted out. "Delivery should be more prompt."

"You're fussy about the ingredients, so they have to make a fresh batch for you. Every time." The boy rocked his weight from one foot to the other. "How'd you dial?" Sherlock held up one bare foot and wiggled his toes. The boy's eyes widened. "Really?"

"No, you're on speed dial, I mashed it with my elbow," Sherlock said, rolling his eyes.

He seemed rather disappointed by that. "I don't think," he stared, and Sherlock cut him off.

"Don't think, that is the last thing I need, you attempting to get enough of your brain together to attempt THOUGHT. Get over here," he said, and the boy, sufficiently weak willed to bow to the pressure in Sherlock's voice, did as he was told.

"Gloves in the drawer, goggles on top of the fridge, smock hanging in the closet." The boy stopped dead, not sure which to do first. Sherlock sighed. "Put the bag down." The paper bag full of takeout hit the counter, and hands free at last, the boy scampered off to find the safety equipment.

"You're not wearing any of this," the boy said.

"Yes, I don't make mistakes with my materials," Sherlock gritted out. "You do not seem to be quite so stable, so we're going to do this." It was annoying, but necessary. John had bought, borrowed or brought everything home, and Sherlock had shoved it all in whatever drawer or space he could find, never intending to use any of it. John had sighed, and occasionally slapped the goggles down next to Sherlock's experiments, but for the most part, he didn't make much of a fuss.

In exchange, Sherlock used some of it. Sometimes. When he remembered.

As the boy shrugged the lab coat on, Sherlock frowned at the equipment in front of him. "Who said you weren't supposed to talk to me?" he said, finally catching on that piece of the conversation.

"What? Oh, I'm new, and when I started at the shop, the dragon lady, that's what all the blokes call the manger, she's crazy, but you know, it's a job. She took me aside and showed me the list of the customers we didn't take cheques from, and which ones are always drunk when they call, an' the ones that flake on paying."

"I should not be on any of those lists," Sherlock said, wondering if he should be insulted.

"No, you're not, they've got your picture on the wall, ya know, with one of those red circles with a line through it kind of deals, like, NO. Just NO. And she said, don't talk to Mr. Holmes."

"That seems a bit much," Sherlock said, now pretty sure he should be insulted.

"Yeah, well, Dr. Watson told me to, um, what did he say? Um, to not engage with you, under any circumstances, if you had a problem, you needed to call the shop, that was the agreement. And Mrs. Hudson said to just put the bag on the mat and let you slide the money out under the door, and don't get into a conversation because it won't end well."

Okay, now he was insulted. "Listen, just because-"

"And there was that one time that nice copper was outside-"

"Fine, fine, I'm unstable and unreasonable, I understand." Sherlock glared until the boy had his goggles in place. "Now, reach over here, slip your hand under the dish , fingers at 90 degree angle to mine, and support it from the bottom so I can release it." The boy blinked at him, vacant and confused. Sherlock groaned. "This is going to be a long night."

**London:**

Greg Lestrade was yelling before he even put his feet on the stairs. "There appears to be some sort of notation in the Yard's system, put there by your git of a brother, no doubt," he shouted, stomping up the flight. "That any and every time your name, your finger prints, or something that is clearly, unmistakably you comes across the wires, I'm the one who gets the call.

"Years and years of bloody beat work, training, education, experience, and my division appears to be babysitting Sherlock Holmes!" He pounded once on the flat door, a perfunctory gesture at best, before he threw it open and stomped in. "And so when there's a report that a delivery boy went to deliver something to 221B Baker street and never bloody came back, guess who gets the call? Despite the fact that I am not on duty, I am not planning on being on duty, and I am doing nothing more than dreaming of a pint and a pillow, here I am, looking for a missing teenager, that I'm sure-"

He paused in the middle of the living room. In the kitchen, Sherlock was bent over his microscope, wearing pajama pants and a too small blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows. On the other side of the table, a skinny kid in a lab coat, goggles, and a huge pair of thick gloves was standing, a beaker under one arm and a glass stirring rod in the other hand. It was dripping on the floor. His long hair was scraped back in an uneven ponytail on the crown of his head, and there was a faint smell of burnt hair and something horribly acidic in the air, and Greg realized he had a sizable hole in one leg of his pants and one sneaker was a bluish gray. Despite this, the boy blinked at him behind the goggles, a wide grin on his face. To his right, something was smoldering, a curl of smoke rising from a stack of breakfast plates.

A brown paper bag was leaking on the counter beside the sink.

Greg stood there, so exhausted he couldn't see straight. "Sherlock." Sherlock didn't look up. "Sherlock!" That got him a humming sound of inquiry, and he sighed.

"You can't kidnap people," he said. "Kid, you okay? Erik Shah, right?"

"Oh, yeah, sorry, I shoulda called in," the boy said, his dark eyes bright. "But this is brilliant! It really is!"

"Stir," Sherlock said, and Erik jolted.

"Oh, oh, yeah." He went back to stirring as Greg collapsed into John's usual chair.

"I might keep him," Sherlock said, his voice dry.

Cradling his head in his hands, Lestrade groaned. "Sherlock, you cannot keep the kid who comes to deliver your curry!"

"It's okay, he's paying me fifty quid," Erik said, "and really. Brilliant. I'm not kidding. This is great."

"See, he wants to stay. I've always wanted a minion."

"Oh, Christ, you're only a skull shaped hideout away from being a supervillian as it is, can we skip the bloody mention of minions?"

"Taaaaacky," Sherlock drawled out.

Greg rubbed his temples. "When, exactly, is John due back?"

"Sunday. 1600 hours. Heathrow. Flight 1242. Not that I'm keeping track," Sherlock said, and that was an ugly, ugly tone of voice, even coming from him.

Lestrade heaved a mental sigh. "Longest bloody week of my life," he muttered under his breath.

"Oh," Erik said, looking between them. "Is Dr. Watson on holiday?"

"So to speak," Greg told him.

"Not in the least," Sherlock said, just as the beaker in Erik's hand cracked and the bottom fell out. The crash of glass and liquid on the kitchen floor made Greg and Erik jump. Sherlock glanced at his watch. "That took longer than I thought it would."

"Is that toxic?" Lestrade asked him, jumping up and steering the inert boy towards the sink. "Wash. Wash, wash, wash!"

"But there's dishes in there!"

"We'll throw them out! Wash!" Greg jerked his head around. "Sherlock, is this toxic?"

"Not toxic." Sherlock said, tone laconic. He didn't even look up from his microscope.

"Oh, thank God, really, this just isn't acceptable, Holmes!" The kid seemed to think he was done washing his gloved hands, and Lestrade held him in place with one firm hand on his back. "Keep washing til I tell you to stop."

"They're gloves, Lestrade, just have him take them off and throw them away, if you're going to overreact to this extent," Sherlock said. There was more amusement in his voice than Lestrade was comfortable with, and he paused to glare.

"Is this stuff going to eat through your floor tile?"

Sherlock sat back from his microscope, mouth opening. He closed it without saying a word. He considered, his eyes narrowing to sharp slits. "Possibly," he said after a second, and went back to the microscope.

"Jesus!" Lestrade started throwing open the doors to the cabinets. "Where's your dustpan?"

"Under the sink. Why do you care, it's not your floor."

"Yes, but-" Lestrade stopped. Why did he care? He had no idea. But he did open the cabinet under the sink and grab the dustpan and a pair of yellow cleaning gloves. Crouching down, he swept up as much of the cloudy liquid as he could, and the remains of the glass beaker.

Erik was staring down at him. "Um, sir? If it's not toxic, then why would it eat through the tile?"

Greg paused in the act of dumping the disaster into the rubbish bin. His head came up, slow and even and smooth, and he stared at Sherlock. "Well, it's mildly radioactive," Sherlock said, making a notation on the notepad next to him.

"Fuckin' brilliant," Erik breathed, and Lestrade dumped the dustpan, brush, and gloves into the bin. He reached around Erik and scooped the dishes out of the sink, sending them crashing into the trash. He took the gloves off of the kid, and the lab coat, and shoved them in as well. Then he picked up the entire bin, and walked out of the flat. When he came back in, Erik was still standing there, hands in the spray of the water in the sink.

"More soap, lots more soap," Lestrade told him, and the kid reached for the bottle. "I'm using your shower," he said to Sherlock.

"What? Wait, no! No, you are not."

"Yes, I am, in that I have touched something RADIOACTIVE!" Greg yelled back at him.

"If you're going to be naked every time you get exposed to radiation in this flat, you're going to be dropping your trousers every time you come over!" Sherlock glared at him. "And that is not acceptable!"

"Neither is having a radioactive flat, Sherlock!"

"Why is the kitchen bin on the sidewalk?" Mrs. Hudson asked from the doorway. "Didn't John just buy that new bin?"

"Because the biohazard team hasn't shown up yet," Lestrade told her, stripping off his shirt as he walked through the living room. "Hello, Mrs. Hudson."

"Hello, Inspector!" She didn't seem to find it odd that he was stripping in the middle of the flat. "Sherlock, why does it smell like burnt hair in here? It's like a bad hairdressers shop."

"Unrelated to the bin or the current experiment," Sherlock said. "I'm trying to focus here."

"There was something on the stove," Erik explained. "I think the water boiled out."

"Oh, that was the good saucepan, wasn't it?"

"Will you all just SHUT UP?" Sherlock said, sounding frustrated.

Lestrade was perversely pleased. In the bathroom, he stripped down to his shorts and turned the shower on, stepping under the spray. A sudden crash from the kitchen made him start, and he almost broke his leg as he got out of the shower just a little too fast, his foot sliding across the floor and his knee going out from under him.

Grabbing a towel, he wrapped it around his waist and grabbed his gun from his clothes before he ran out back to the kitchen.

"What the hell happened, I was gone for five goddamn minutes!"

Mrs. Hudson was wringing her hands together, Erik was still standing there with his hands in the sink, and Sherlock was clutching a hand towel around his hand, still leaning over his microscope. Mrs. Hudson pointed. "He took the beaker off of the flame and it broke." There was glass and steaming liquid and blood on the table, and the bunsen burner had been turned off, so that was something.

"Minor cut," he said, "put your trousers back on in my flat."

"I can't, they're covered in experiment," Lestrade shot back. "Your experiment. Let me see."

With extreme reluctance, Sherlock held out his hand. Greg peeled the edge of the towel back, and the blood welled up immediately. He, Sherlock and Mrs. Hudson looked, and as one, all three of them yelled, "JOHN!"

There was a beat of silence, then Erik said, "I thought Dr. Watson was on holiday," sounding very confused.

Lestrade cursed, and Mrs. Hudson made a clucking noise under her breath, and Sherlock just went back to his microscope, his jaw tight. Rubbing his forehead, Lestrade made a decision and bit the bullet. "Okay, that's going to need more than a plaster. Let's go, everyone."

"Don't you want to get dressed, dear?" Mrs. Hudson said.

"I'd like to not ever touch the clothes I was wearing, ever again, but I doubt there's anything here that'd fit me."

"Oh, I'm sure John's scrubs'll do, they make those in three sizes, too big, too small and doesn't fit anyone," Mrs. Hudson said, cheerfully. "So he ends up with all sorts of them. One minute."

"Can I stop washing my hands now?" Erik asked.

"Yes," Sherlock and Lestrade chorused.

Sherlock leaned back from his microscope. "Done." He pulled out his phone with his good hand, and looked at it, his face unreadable.

"We need to get you to the hospital." Lestrade glanced down at the phone. "What is it?"

"John hasn't texted. In almost eight hours." Sherlock put the phone away. "Even taking the time change into account..." His jaw jumped, a muscle working hard.

Lestrade sighed. "Yeah, c'mon, let's get you stitched up. And you need to stop playing with dangerous chemicals when your mind's somewhere else."

"I can-"

"No, you can't." Mrs. Hudson reappeared with a pair of scrubs pants and a sweatshirt, which Lestrade took with a smile. "Thanks, Mrs. Hudson. Will you just make sure these two go down to my car? I'll be right there."

"Why am I going?" Erik asked.

"Because my concept of 'significant' amounts of radiation doesn't seem to match up with everyone else's," Sherlock said, his tone wry.

"Any amount is significant," Mrs. Hudson tutted.

"Living in a bloody brick building exposes you to an 'amount,'" Sherlock groused.

"You're bleeding on the runner, dear."

Lestrade shook his head as headed back to the bathroom. Fishing his mobile from his pocket, he sent a quick text to Mycroft Holmes:

'Check on Watson. There may be a problem. Lestrade'

**Afghanistan:**

Breathing was an agony. John Watson rolled to his side, and sucked his breath in through his teeth, tasting dust and blood and the metallic sting of pain. He closed his eyes, trying to concentrate, trying to deal with the pain, and it took him time to localize it, remember what was going on.

He'd gotten shot in the goddamned left shoulder again. Sherlock was going to be insufferable.

His right hand came up to fumble at his shoulder. The pain was fading now, enough for him to do a self-diagnostic. His shirt was dry and dusty, but there was no blood. The body armor had stopped the bullet, but bloody hell, the pain was fierce. He tried to move his left arm, and the agony racheted up.

Broken collarbone.

His forehead was wet, his hair was sticky against his skull, and there was an ache there, one that made his vision blurry and his perception unstable. He'd probably hit his head when he'd been knocked down; the lump was forming on the back of his skull.

He pried his eyes open and saw Cooper's head turned towards him, the Corporal's mouth moving. John blinked, squeezing his eyes shut and opening them again when he could do it without feeling like he was going to puke. The roaring in his ears slowly decreased, and he took a deep breath.

"Captain?" Cooper's voice solidified finally, and John struggled to push himself up, making the mistake of putting any weight at all on his left arm. The radiating pain was agonizing, and he collapsed back onto his right elbow.

"Yeah, yeah, Jesus." John dragged himself up. "God. Damn."

"Get up," Warren snapped, and if anything, he looked even more panicky than he had before. He'd taken his helmet off, his red hair was plastered to his face with sweat and his eyes were huge and darting, the pupils dilated. John could tell, with a single glance, that his plans, what plans he had, were rapidly collapsing around him. He was working himself up into a true panic, a state of mind that John could manipulate.

"Why would you-" John sucked in a breath and regretted it.

"I knew you had body armor on, but I'd like to keep you under control," Warren snapped. "I'm not interested in getting into a fight with you. Get up. Let's go."

"I am not leaving him." John turned back to Cooper, relieved to see that Cooper's movements hadn't reopened his wound. But there was a lot of blood soaking into the dirt beneath him. John dragged himself over to Cooper's side. "Sorry, Corporal, I know I promised I'd pick up some milk, but the front pocket of my bag isn't refrigerated."

"Wrong guy," Cooper said, with a tight smile. He took a deep breath and coughed. "I'd prefer a pint of Guiness."

"Don't have that either, sorry."

"Get up," Warren said, jamming the gun in John's direction.

John stared up at the black hole of the barrel, a strange sort of calm descending on him. "You are in over your head. You've seen my paperwork, haven't you?" he asked, his voice soft. "Do you really think I can disappear without anyone coming to look for me? Do you really think there is any way I can die that won't make you the first and only suspect?"

The gun trembled, just a fraction of an inch, and John sucked in a breath through his teeth. "You see," he said, with a faint smile, "I'm due home in less than 40 hours. And if I am not at the airport, on time, in one piece, my partner will come looking for me."

"It's a big country. And I'm not leaving your body anywhere it can be found. Get up."

"I don't think you understand the situation you find yourself in. This is not a polite military inquiry, more interested in keeping a lid on things than getting results. This is Sherlock Holmes. He's brilliant, he's terrifying, and he's gloriously amoral. He's part bloodhound and part pit bull. You can dump my body in the mountains, and that might never be found, but he will find you. And he will make you bleed until you give him whatever he wants."

John gave him a faint smile. "Think of me like the water receding before a tsunami. I'm your warning. Run. Run as far and as fast as you can, and you might live. If you shoot me here, if you take me with you, there is nowhere you can hide, no place you can go where he will not find you. It'd take him a matter of hours, at most, to patch together my work, to reach the same conclusion, and then he will come looking for you.

John was calm now, utterly calm, never breaking eye contact, never shifting position. "So you have a choice. Drop your weapon, give yourself up, and take a dishonorable discharge and a quick trip back home. Or spend the rest of your very short life waiting for him to find you, and shred you."

"Shut up," Warren snarled out, but his gun was visibly wobbling now, his eyes panicked, his jaw tight. "This is your last chance. Let's go."

John shook his head. "I won't leave him. Don't do this. This is-" His breath hissed between his teeth. "This is stupid. This is so unbelievably stupid."

Warren's foot came up and kicked, heel first, into John's injured shoulder, and beneath the crippling agony of the blow, he felt the ends of the bone grind together. He struggled to breathe, choking and gagging as the nausea overwhelmed him. As if from a distance, he felt Warren grab him, yank him to his feet, and John's legs weren't really up to the task of holding him, but he was shoved forward.

His good hand grabbed futilely for Cooper, but an instant later, he was out of reach.

"You don't want to get caught," he said, and the words were calm and even despite the pain. He stumbled, grabbing a rock and using it to prop himself up. Warren was breathing just as hard as he was, and John leaned back against the stone, getting himself under control. He could see Cooper, lying beside his tipped over medical bag, behind Warren's back.

"That's what you're thinking of right now, the shame and the fear, and that's something, I know it is, but you haven't crossed that line, not yet. This, what you're doing now, this is murder. Leaving Cooper like this is murder, no matter what happens to me, and you can't risk a bullet hole in me, can you. You need to make this look like an accident, an accident you had nothing to do with, but everything you've done has left a trail, an arrow pointing right at your back. There are too many people who know what's happening, too many connections, you are going to get caught, Warren.

"He will find you. And if I'm alive, he'll just kill you. If I'm dead-" John's teeth flashed, sharp and bright and hard. "If I'm dead, he will make you bleed."

"Shut up!" Warren shoved him up against a rock wall, John's back bouncing against it, stumbling, finding his feet again, wavering as the pain crashed through him. "Just... Shut up."

"There is no way out of this," John told him, as the gun raised, pointing at him, at his head, and he took a deep breath. "Other than to lay down your arms and surrender. That is your only chance to live." John held up his good hand. "Put the gun down."

Warren's eyes were filled with tears, but his face twisted in a grimace, and his arm jerked up, jerked and twisted, and there was the sudden, sharp retort of a double shot.

John jerked with it, even as Warren pitched forward, crumbling to the dust. Behind him, still lying on the ground, Cooper lowered his arm. John's Browning, still clutched in his shaking fingers, hit the dusty stone.

"I knew you were sharp enough to pick up on the hint," John said, crouching over Warren for only an instant, it was clear he was gone, bullet through the neck. "Jesus, good shot."

Cooper was panting. "Milk. In the front pocket. Yeah. I got it." He swallowed, and John made a point of ignoring the tears in the young man's eyes. "Is he-"

"Yes," John said, cutting him off. "I'm sorry you had to do that."

"Yeah, me, too," Cooper said, his head falling back, eyes closing. "Non-combatants aren't supposed to be armed," he added with a faint smile.

"I was being kidnapped by someone I was pretty sure was going to try to kill me. I think I can be excused for bending the rules. Besides, I didn't use it, you did."

Cooper gave a snort of laughter that died off on a cough. "Captain? Don't let me die out here."

"You're not going to die, Jesus, stop being melodramatic." The wound had reopened with the movement, and John grabbed his bag with his good hand. "Help's on the way."

"How do you know?"

"Mobile had a chip in it. Moment it's destroyed, it goes offline, and an alert goes out to-" He paused. "The person I'm working for. I have five minutes to check in, if I don't, he scrambles every possible person to my last known position. They should be here momentarily."

"Sir?"

"Yes?"

"Permission to speak freely?"

"Go for it." John reached for a fresh gauze pad.

"You're an idiot, sir. What the fuck? Why would you get into a car with him? Jesus, I nearly had a heart attack when I saw you."

John couldn't bite back a laugh. "Someday, let me tell you about all the times I've been kidnapped in the line of duty." He paused. "Actually, let's not. It's too humiliating. Instead, let's just say, if there's one thing I've learned, it's that when your partner gets snagged by the criminals of the world, it's your job to go and get him out."

Cooper smiled. "Still a stupid thing to do." He swallowed. "You thought I might be part of it."

"At the beginning, I couldn't be sure."

"That's why-" His words were slurring now, from blood loss or exhaustion. "That's why you told me about Sherlock, isn't it?"

"He has a certain threatening aura once people know a little about him," John said with a shrug. "And I figured it couldn't hurt to make sure you understood that yeah, he'd be coming for me if I didn't get home on time. I'll take what protection I can get." He laughed. "The rest of this was just desperate monologuing to distract Warren long enough for you to get to the gun."

Cooper gave him a look. "Was anything you told me a lie?"

"No."

Cooper's eyes shut. "Then you're lying to yourself if you think you exaggerated at all. If you didn't go home on Sunday, I'm pretty sure the whole base would've been on fire by Monday afternoon."

"Don't exaggerate, Cooper." John grinned down at him, trying to ignore the way his vision was going fuzzy at the edges. "Fire is so inefficient. Did I ever tell you about the time he accidentally made napalm?" He paused. "Well, he claimed it was an accident. In retrospect, I'm not sure if that's the truth."

"Oh, GOD," Cooper said, just as a rush of heavily armed personnel appeared from all sides, appearing as if they sprouted from the ground.

"How much time did you waste sneaking up on us?" John asked, dizzy now that the worst was over. "I need a stretcher, now."

"Captain Watson?" one man said, stepping forward. "We need you to come with us."

"Yeah, I figured." John was pushed out of the way by calm, efficient looking medic, who was already starting an IV line on Cooper. John staggered to his feet. "Call... Adams... Tell him to let my contact know that I'm fine-"

His vision faded out and the ground rushed up to meet him.

**Day Six: Saturday****  
****London**

"Pictures."

"Yes."

Sherlock gave him a horrified look. "Pictures," he repeated.

"Think we've already covered this, yes." Lestrade looked like he was holding onto his last nerve with both hands and his teeth. "Pictures. I know, I know, you don't like them, but you're going to have to cope. You can do it. I have faith."

"Pictures." Sherlock was still stuck on that. He poked the stack with one finger, disdain leaking into his expression. "I cannot work under these circumstances."

"Wonderful, we've discovered other words! Fantastic." Lestrade leaned forward in his chair, folding his hands on the desk in front of him. "You owe me."

"I'm not sure how you've reached that conclusion, but it's erroneous," Sherlock said, pushing the stack away from him. Inwardly, he gave a little shudder. Pictures.

"Well, there's the little matter of not arresting you last night, convincing Erik's parents not to press charges, not letting the hospital throw you out of the emergency room untreated when you started diagnosing other patients in the waiting room, and not arresting you again when you compounded your injuries by getting into a fight with a group of football hooligans while I was arguing with the admins that they had to treat you."

"They started it," Sherlock said, slumping low in his chair, arms crossed over his chest. He was well aware that his pout could only be called petulant, but there wasn't much he could do about that. "And they had warrants."

"Which is a big part of why I didn't arrest you," Lestrade agreed, rubbing his forehead. "Sherlock, is this what you do to John on a daily basis? A war zone might be safer."

Sherlock flinched, his shoulders hunching. Across the desk, Lestrade sighed. "He's tougher than me, I'm starting to realize that." There was a squeak as he leaned forward in his chair, a soft scuff as he pushed the stack of photos closer to Sherlock. "Look, as a personal favor to me, would you please look at these?"

"I don't do photos," Sherlock bit out, his back up. "I do crime scenes."

"Yes, but this isn't my crime scene. The victim's employer asked me to keep an eye on the case, because they want to be certain it's being properly handled."

"It's not, I haven't been given access to the crime scene," Sherlock mumbled, and a ball of paper bounced off of his forehead. He glanced up, but Lestrade just gave him a wide-eyed, innocent look.

"Just look at the photos," he said, his voice wheedling. "You can do more looking at still shots than most of the department could do at the scene."

Well, that was true. Still, reluctance tugged at him as Sherlock reached for the photos. He hated dealing with photographs. They never gave the full view, they always focused on what the current investigator and his team thought was important, and most of the time, they were wrong. All the details Sherlock needed were just out of frame, and it made him crazy.

Of course, having no access to the rest of the sensory input was just as annoying, but it just added up to the general reason why he despised being asked to look into a crime after the fact. He should refuse, he knew that, but he had the sinking feeling that Lestrade was right.

The football fans were probably a bit over the top, in terms of things Lestrade was willing to deal with. In Sherlock's defense, it had started out rough and gotten worse.

They were drunk and annoying, and they were frightening the rest of the room, and Sherlock was in a bad mood, and they were right there, medical care was mere feet away, and police were already on the scene, and he hadn't been able to make any logical argument for not beating the hell out of them.

Which he'd proceeded to do. After they took the first swing, of course, he wasn't stupid. Of course, it took ten minutes of pointing out the flaws of both teams to get to that point, and even then, the drunks had seemed more confused than insulted.

Left with little choice and with a steadily mounting sense of frustration, Sherlock may have implied, in the most technical terms, that the two opposing team captains had been meeting for what could politely be termed a romantic rendezvous or two, and that had registered as a 'very bad thing' for all concerned.

Sherlock would've thought that pointing out the stupidity of going with a 5-3-2 positioning in the face of a stronger defensive team would've been more insulting than talking about who the idiot was sleeping with, but he'd long since determined that not everyone had his enlightened values.

Lestrade had not been happy to see the brawl, and Sherlock knew he'd determined the source of it immediately, but to his credit, he'd gotten right into the spirit of things. Erik had gone home with a split lip, a black eye, and a book on how not to get hit in the face from Sherlock's library.

It was possible that he did, in fact, owe Lestrade a favor.

Especially since his black eye was even more impressive than Erik's. Sherlock had tried giving him a book, too, but the gesture had been met with stony, unamused silence and a glare that reminded Sherlock a little bit of the ones John leveled at him.

He kind of missed that glare.

With a sigh, he started flipping through the photos, studying each one with a flick of his eyes before he moved on to the next "Background?"

"Killed at home, single shot to the head, close range, he knew his attackers."

Sherlock frowned at a shot of the victims wrists. "He was held down prior to death." Flipping to the next one, his eyebrows flicked up. "The wounds are post mortem." And gruesome.

"Yeah, the DI in charge thinks they were sending a warning."

Sherlock snorted. "No. They were..." His eyes narrowed as his voice trailed away. "Looking for something. Something inside the body. They were interrupted, though, they weren't able to-" He looked up. "Someone walked in on it."

"Neighbor saw the door open and gave a yell from the hall."

"They deserted the corpse, but there's something they need. Something the victim swallowed, and now they're trying to recover it." Sherlock grabbed his coat. "Where's the body?"

"Morgue, St. Barts, are you-"

"I swear to God, if you say 'sure' or 'certain' or any other word that questions my conclusion, I will not be held responsible for my actions," Sherlock bit out. "Get the idiot of a DI up to speed, and I'll go head them off before they can get to the body."

"But how do you-"

"Angle of the cuts, depth, location, severity, clear indications of speed, but not rage, look at the striations, the way-" Sherlock stopped, shaking his head. "They weren't cutting the body, Lestrade, they were cutting into the body. Ask John what the difference is!" He took off for the front door at a dead run. "Get the DI and get to St Barts!"

"Sherlock!"

"His employer's a defense contractor!" Sherlock yelled back over his shoulder. "Get the DI!"

"I hate it when you do that!"

Chuckling, Sherlock shot down the stairs, through the front lobby and out to the street. There was a cab right there, and moments later, he was speeding across the city at what was probably far above the legal speed limit.

**London:**

Sherlock had hit the lab at a dead run.

Molly Hooper looked up from her microscope slide, blinking in that owlish, curious way that she had, her face breaking into a wide, off-kilter smile. "Oh, hello, Sherlock, what are you-" The words ended in a strangled shriek as Sherlock reached her in two long strides, wrapped an arm around her waist, lifted her off her feet, slapped his free hand over her mouth, and carried her into the nearby closet.

It took a second, but Molly started struggling in earnest as Sherlock dropped her feet back to the ground. He grabbed her, pulling her in tight against his body, not that he had much of a choice, it was a very small closet, and he was taking up most of the available room, and managed to get the door shut. She couldn't get much effort behind her wiggling, but she managed to sink a solid elbow into his stomach, and he winced.

"Stay still," he hissed in her ear, and she jerked against his grip again. "Or they're going to catch us."

She went quiet, relaxing just a bit, but her hands came up and fumbled at his wrist, pulling his palm away from his mouth. "Bad guys?" she whispered.

"No, we're playing hide and seek. Yes. Bad guys." He leaned his ear against the closet door. "Wait, bad guys, that is just-"

"Well, with you, I never know," she said, and he could hear her voice wobble, and immediately felt bad. He hated feeling bad. He hated realizing he felt bad. It was annoying.

God, he wished John was here to keep Molly stuffed in the closet so he could do something else. Something involving being shot at. Right now, he desperately wanted to be shot at rather than be hovering in a closet with a woman who was making the oddest little panicked squeaky noises under her breath.

It was like an asthmatic hamster on a broken exercise wheel.

Sherlock found it very disconcerting. "Could you please stop making that noise?" he whispered, his voice as low as possible.

"I can't breathe," she said, her voice thin.

"Of course you can breathe, if you weren't breathing, you wouldn't be making that noise, and it's very-" His teeth snapped shut before he could say anything that would cause John to strangle him. How odd. His brain had developed a 'John would be disappointed in you' setting at some point, he wasn't sure how he felt about that. "It's hard to concentrate, so please, just... Try to calm down?"

Molly twisted around to bury her face in his chest, and Sherlock tensed. If he had access to his mobile, or dared use it, the text he would've sent to John would be, 'Trapped in a closet with Molly H. Civilian control is your job, not mine, come home. SH'

The thought made him smile, but outside, he heard the lab door open, and his hand closed on the back of Molly's head, holding her still. Through the closet door, he heard the sounds of drawers and cabinets being opened, contents being shifted. The morgue was locked, he realized, and they were looking for a key that would get them in. His eyes closing, he listened carefully. One set of footsteps. He'd seen a group of four, had been in too much of a rush to get to Molly's cheefully lit office before them to note much else, but it appeared that the intruder was alone. Where the other three were, he didn't know.

But it made his task now much easier.

He cupped a hand around Molly's ear, and whispered, a faint trickle of sound, "Follow my lead." He felt her nod in the darkness just as the closet door opened.

"Do you MIND?" Sherlock said, in his most indignant tone, and the man holding the doorknob blinked at them, Molly wide eyed and mussed in Sherlock's arms, and Sherlock could almost see his brain stalling out, trying to figure out what to do with this situation, because he had a gun and had just walked in on two people in a closet who appeared to be making out, and that was not in the plan.

Then the heel of Sherlock's hand slammed into his nose, snapping his head back and sending him stumbling.

Before he could recover, Sherlock followed it with a roundhouse punch to the chin and assisted him to the ground by hooking a foot behind his ankle and sending him sprawling. He caught the man by the front of the shirt and lowered him soundlessly to the ground, recovering the gun as he did.

"Wow," Molly said behind him, and there was a squeaky note in her voice that was completely different from any other squeaky note he'd ever heard from her. Sherlock looked at her, a bit suspicious, but she just gave him a wobbly smile.

"Duct tape," he said, "now."

In a matter of moments, they'd bound the guy hand and foot, and Sherlock taped off his mouth before shoving him into the closet. "Corpse," he said, shoving the door shut and jamming a stool under the knob. "Where?"

"Which one?" Molly asked, brow crinkling, and he bit back a curse.

"Murder victim, the Yard would've sent it over this morning."

She blinked, trying to think, as Sherlock checked the hallway. "Oh! Oh, I know which one you're talking about. It hasn't been brought up yet, we needed to clear space for the autopsy, and it only just arrived, the Yard always assumes that things'll go faster than they really do and-" She caught a glimpse of Sherlock's face and cut herself off. "Downstairs. Ambulance bay."

Sherlock paused, staring at her. She stared back. "What?" she asked, reaching up to touch her hair, her expression nervous. "Is it my mascara, because, honestly, I wear that all of the time, and-"

Leaving her here was a bad idea. The other three were still on the loose; someone would find her. Plus, he would likely need her help to get access to the body. She worked here, they'd release the corpse to her, he wasn't likely to get the same assistance. But she kept talking, and it was disconcerting.

Sherlock checked the hallway, not surprised to find it empty. They'd be busy at the morgue for now, and their best option was to get out of here, and take the body with them. "Is anyone else on duty down here this afternoon?"

"What? Oh, no, light staffing today, just me and Boyce took the day off, you know how it is with the mid-week appointments, I think he's going to the dentist-"

"Shut up and let's go," he said, grabbing her hand and heading for the hall. She stumbled once before she got her feet under her and then they were running together, down the hall and down the stairs, staying away from the morgue and anywhere else where people would congregate, her hand holding onto his with almost desperate strength.

In the ambulance bay there were a couple of emergency vehicles, and a couple of bored looking paramedics, leaning on the hood of their vehicle and sipping tea from paper cups. One of them glanced up when the doors burst open and gave Molly a sunny smile. "Hey, Mol," he called. "You finally ready for this one? I'm bored stiff, here."

"Not me," his partner drawled. "They can pay me to stand around and not get vomited on all they'd like."

"Bad night," the first paramedic explained. "Alcohol cases all over the place." He grinned at Sherlock. "Who's the new guy?"

Molly's eyes slid in Sherlock's direction. "Temp." Her smile was a bit too wide, a bit too bright.

"Temp?"

"Intern," Sherlock corrected her. "Shall we?"

"Uh, yeah, sure." He lead the way around to the rear of the ambulance, and together, they removed the gurney holding the body bag. Molly chatted easily with both of them and signed the paperwork that was presented to her, and Sherlock was grateful he hadn't left her in the closet.

Sherlock pulled the gurney around as Molly said good-bye to the paramedics. As their ambulance pulled away, Molly let out a sigh of relief. She glanced at Sherlock, a sunny smile on her face. "Okay, then, what are we going to do?"

He opened the body bag to check and make sure that he had the right one. Yes, face and form matched the one from the photos this morning, the wounds to the abdomen more brutal in real life. "Steal another ambulance and get the body out of here."

She paused. "Wait, excuse me, what?"

"I spotted four of them going into the hospital, and we only dealt with one, and I don't want to deal with the other three, so we're going to get the body out of here." He pulled his mobile out of his pocket. "Load it up."

"We can't, we can't STEAL an ambulance." She blinked at him.

"Of course we can, I can hotwire one fairly easily." He stared down at her. "Shoo. Shoo, shoo, shoo, load it up."

"This isn't a good idea, Sherlock," Molly said, but she was moving the gurney around to an unoccupied ambulance.

"It's a brilliant idea," he told her, yanking his mobile out of his pocket. "Lestrade," he snapped when the DI picked up, "we've got the body, we're going to clear out of Bart's."

"Wait, no, we're on our way over, stay there. Don't just, ugh, don't take the body, Sherlock."

"No choice, the killers are at St. Barts. I got one of them, he's tied up in Molly's coat closet, but the other three are going to figure out that what they're looking for isn't in the morgue and head down here, and I don't want to be here when they do." He resented the fact that John had taken his gun with him. He liked John's gun. Mycroft had flatly refused to give him one, or official permission to carry one, something about Sherlock being fundimentally unsuited to being armed, whatever that meant.

Sherlock threw open the door to the ambulance, leaning over to check out the steering column and the underside of the dashboard. "We'll bring the body back to the Yard. Get people over here to deal with the-"

Molly let out a shriek, and Sherlock's head jerked up. The elevator was moving, judging by the lighted floor indicator above the doors. "Now would be good, Lestrade," he said, disconnecting the call before leaning over to get to work on the starter.

Molly leaned in the open door and flipped the visor down, catching the keys as they fell loose. Sherlock looked at them, nonplussed. "That works, too."

"They always leave them there," Molly said, as Sherlock got out of her way. She slid into the driver's seat. "Because who would be stupid enough to steal an ambulance?"

"Can you drive?" Sherlock said, running for the rear doors. He manhandled the gurney into place, a task that had been beyond Molly.

"Yes, but-" She worried her lower lip between her teeth. "I don't have a license, technically."

"Don't care," Sherlock said, locking the gurney into place and reaching for the rear door to pull them shut. "Why?" he asked, unable to resist asking.

"It was taken away. Illegal street racing," Molly said as the elevators opened.

"Wait, what?" Sherlock said, just as she threw the ambulance into reverse and stomped on the gas. Sherlock, not prepared, went flying forward, grabbing onto the back of the driver's seat as his weight shifted and he nearly landed on his face. "Illegal WHAT?"

"Kidding," Molly said, and it ended on a shriek as one of the men stepping off the elevator brought up a hand to aim a gun in their direction. Sherlock grabbed Molly's head and shoved it down as the gun went off, but they were already moving, already shrieking backwards across the narrow parking area, and Molly threw them into first gear and executed a sharp turn, barely missing a support column as they tore for the exit.

"Are you? Are you REALLY kidding?" Sherlock grabbed desperately for the walls as they turned onto the public street, hitting a couple of speedbumps fast enough to knock him off his feet twice. Both times, he staggered back to his feet, only to go sprawling again. He grabbed for the gurney as they took a turn.

"Yes, of course." Molly fumbled around until she found the sirens and turned them on. "The Yard?"

"The Yard," Sherlock agreed, a little traumatized by now, but his mobile was buzzing, and he ignored the fact that Molly was babbling at the other drivers, waving her hands in an energetic and terrifying manner. "Lestrade, where are-" Molly jerked them around a corner, and Sherlock was almost certain that they took the turn on two wheels, and he slammed into the far wall of the ambulance.

"Sherlock? What was that?" Lestrade sounded panicked.

"My control of the situation collapsing," Sherlock mumbled, prying himself away from shelves of medical supplies.

"What?"

"Is there any chance that you were able to stop the killers at the hospital?"

"We found the one in the closet, but none of the others. Two ambulances are missing."

"Wonderful." Sherlock stumbled to the rear of the ambulance, staring out at the traffic behind them. "Yes, we're being followed."

"Where are you?"

"We're in the middle of a high speed chase involving two stolen ambulances!" Sherlock yelled. "Could you please put your considerable skills to locating that, in that it is-"

"High speed chase?" Molly said, accelerating through a red light. "What high speed chase?"

"The one that we're in the middle of," Sherlock said to her, his voice sharp, "So speed would be-" She stomped on the gas, and this time he was expecting it and grabbed for the nearest shelf to stay upright.

"I'm going to get arrested," Molly said, her voice thin and pained. She sniffled.

"Are you crying?" Sherlock stumbled forward and grabbed onto the back of the seat. "Are you seriously crying? You cannot be crying right now. Molly, do not cry, I am warning you."

"I'm not crying," she said, and it was a pained wail.

"Oh, God, you are crying, I promise you're not going to get arrested, I'll tell Lestrade that I kidnapped you at gunpoint."

She sniffled. "Will you? Really?"

"It's the least I can-" Another turn and he thumped into the wall again. "Do."

"Actually, that's true, this has been a horrible day," Molly snapped. "You are a horrible person, Sherlock Holmes, I cannot believe we-"

And just like that, they were surrounded by police cars, lights flashing, sirens wailing, and Molly stomped on the brakes. She also threw out an arm to steady Sherlock as he plowed forward. "I am never doing this again," she said to Sherlock.

"Agreed," he said, stumbling back to his feet, scrambling backwards and hitting the rear doors at full speed, throwing them open and crashing through the officers that were heading straight for them, yelling and waving their arms. They scattered like pigeons as Sherlock landed in their midst, cursing.

"The OTHER ambulance," he yelled. "Not us, you bloody idiots! Them!"

Cops didn't like being called idiots, but it was a strategic error that Sherlock made sometimes, and now, with the road filling with cars and honking horns and confusion, he saw the other ambulance try to turn, only to find itself pinned in by the traffic.

Sherlock cut through the cars, jumping a hood and sliding down on the other side, and they'd stopped in just the wrong place, or just the right place, because they were on a bridge, and there was no where that the other cars could go to get out of the way, and the ambulance was trying to turn, and finding no place to go.

Behind him, Sherlock caught a glimpse of Lestrade, and behind him, Dimmock, and behind him what seemed like half of the stupid cops that the Yard had managed to accumulate, it was like a decreasing scale of intelligence, with Sherlock in the lead and the pursuers getting stupider as they went back, and that thought made Sherlock grin.

He wasn't paying as much attention as he strictly should've been as a car shot forward, and the ambulance turned with a squeal of tires, and Sherlock was in just the wrong place, the grill of the ambulance suddenly there, right in front of him, and he jerked backwards, but not in time, he felt the impact along his body, and he was swept up off of his feet, his face smacking into the hood, or the windshield, he wasn't sure. He felt the vehicle swing around, slamming into the stone railing that edged the bridge and the ambulance came to a violent stop.

Sherlock didn't. He felt his body slide backwards, and then he was airborne, falling, falling, he could hear someone screaming, and he tried to hold onto consciousness, reaching out, his lips forming "John."

That wasn't right, John wasn't here, so who was screaming his name? And that was the last thought that managed to make it through his mind before the darkness swallowed him.

**Afghanistan**

"Dr. Watson?"

John's eyes snapped open. For an instant he was so disoriented that all he could do was sit there, staring at the ceiling, and the worried looking young man that was hanging over him. John swallowed, and his throat was tight and dry and painful. He opened his mouth to reply, and coughed, hard enough to wrack his body.

"Hold on, sir, don't move." The young man, an nurse or aide, judging by his outfit, disappeared from John's view, then reappeared with a glass of water. He guided the straw to John's lips, and John latched onto it, grateful for it. A couple of quick sips, and he relaxed back.

"Thanks," he croaked out. "Corp. Cooper? Is he okay?"

"Yes, sir. Came through surgery with flying colors. No complications." He grinned. "You got him back with time to spare."

John nodded, relief unfolding in his chest. "Where am I?"

"One second, sir, let me get Lieutenant Adams." With a reassuring smile, the man disappeared again, leaving John to catalog his aches.

His shoulder was on fire, but it wasn't so bad, he could cope with that. Broken collarbone would heal, he knew it would, and it would heal clean, provided that he kept it still and didn't let Sherlock lead him off the top of a building somewhere before it could. The problem was, of course, that there was no way he could hide this. It had to be wrapped and his arm would be in a sling, and there was no way to keep that out of sight.

He sighed, just as Adams stepped in. "Captain Watson, how're you doing?" He paused, about to lean back out of the hospital room. "Do you need me to call for the med staff? Are you in pain?"

John waved that off. "It's fine. Cooper?" he asked, wanting a little more reassurance on that front.

"He's fine, sir. Hasn't been out of surgery long, so he's under sedation. I can have a wheelchair brought around, if you want to check on him, but for now-" He held out a phone. "We have someone back in London waiting to talk to you."

John's eyes shot to the clock, and he bit back a curse. Almost a day since he'd talked or contacted Sherlock, which was not a good thing. He pushed himself up, just a little higher on the pillows, and Adams adjusted the bed so he was more or less upright.

"Thank you," John said, taking the mobile from Adams. "Sherlock?"

"No, I'm afraid it's the scary Holmes brother," Mycroft said, his voice crisp and acidic, and out of the corner of his eye, John saw Adams retreat from the room and close the door behind him.

"It's rather funny that you think he isn't the scary Holmes boy." John sighed, trying to find a comfortable position for his shoulder. "I take it you heard about..." His voice trailed away.

"About your complete disregard of the rules of your assignment? About you leaving the base? About getting taken by one of the men you were tasked with exposing? About you getting shot and needing to be evaced? Yes. I have quite the report in front of me." Mycroft's voice had reached that seething ice stage that made John wish that he'd stayed back in his depressing one room flat instead of moving to 221B Baker St. "My blood pressure may never recover."

"Sorry," John said. "Got you your info."

"At far too high a cost. You're under guard now, and will be evacuated as soon as we receive medical clearance to do so. They were wary about moving you while you were unconscious, justifiably so."

"It's fine, I have until tomorrow before I'm due back, don't I?" A solid day of sleep couldn't hurt. But as the silence stretched out, his heart skipped a beat. "Mycroft? What aren't you telling me?"

A faint sigh. "Sherlock's been injured. His prognosis is excellent," he said, cutting John off before his panic could even build to unworkable levels. "But he has been hospitalized. If possible, if medically acceptable, I would like to get you back here as quickly we can."

John was already looking around for his clothes. "What happened?" he bit out. "Jesus. Jesus! Is that why he hasn't called, is he unconscious, is he-" He felt his breath get thin and tight, and a too sudden movement of his shoulder make a stab of agony pour through him. He froze, waiting for it to pass.

"He was struck by a vehicle and knocked unconscious. Also off the side of a bridge, because even in near death experiences, he persists in being overly dramatic," Mycroft said, sounding just as tired as John felt. "DI Lestrade pulled him out of the river before he could drown, but emergency measures had to be taken to resuscitate him."

John was dizzy, and he wasn't sure if it was because of the news or his own pain. "Get me out of here. Now."

"John, you need to be examined. He is fine, he is in no danger at the moment. For safety's sake, they put him on breathing assistance, and he's sleeping comfortably. You need to-"

"Get me out of here," John said, his voice soft and deadly earnest, "or I will hitchhike to the airport and find the first plane heading West."

There was a long beat of silence, interrupted only by John's breath hissing between his teeth, and a faint sigh from Mycroft. "I'll have a military transport together. They can do a final check on the way. If they believe moving you would be detrimental, John, I won't allow the plane to take off."

"I have a broken collarbone and a case of exhaustion, neither of which would prevent me from traveling, and doing it now." Hell, John could probably wrap his own arm if it was necessary, though it would be a lot easier with qualified medical help. "Mycroft?"

"Yes?"

John swallowed. "You're not lying to me right now, are you? He's not in danger?"

The response was immediate and firm. "He is out of danger and will make a full recovery. But your lack of contact prior to the incident was weighing on him. I'd prefer you be here when he wakes up in the hospital." There was a faint, strained laugh. "So I am taking advantage of you to make my own life easier."

John grinned. "I'm fine with that. Keep an eye on him until I get there?" He paused, and, feeling stupid anyway. "Can you give him a message from me? Even if he's not awake to respond to it?"

"Of course."

"Tell him he promised me seven days. A week. I'll be home tomorrow, and if he's given up on me before that, I'll never let him live it down."

Mycroft laughed, a bit louder, a bit more real. "I understand. I'll be sitting with him tonight, so I'll make sure your message is passed on."

"Thanks, Mycroft." Saying their good-byes, they broke the connection just as the hospital door opened again.

"Ready to go, Captain Watson?" the pleasant aide asked. "We have an ambulance standing by to get you to the airport."

"Mycroft, you're such a faker," John mumbled under his breath, even as he nodded. "Thank you. Let's go." Gritting his teeth, he started to move. It was going to be a very long night.


	4. Chapter 4

**Day 7: Sunday**

** London**

"He's waking up."

Sherlock winced. He felt like he'd been hit by a truck. His foggy mind slogged through what memories were available for review and he almost laughed. Oh. He WAS hit by a truck. Well, that explained why everything, and he did mean everything, hurt.

"Can you hear me, Mr. Holmes?"

Sherlock tried to tell the annoying voice to shut up and go away, but there was something in the way, some hard presence in his throat, and, with no other choice, he opened his eyes.

The light was painful, too bright and too white and too much, and he squinted, feeling like his head was going to explode. There was a woman hanging over him, her face too close, and he reared back, or he would've, if there was anywhere to go. Behind her, a man was holding a chart, white lab coat and stethoscope and faintly strained expression.

Sherlock blinked at him, head aching, nausea curling through him, forcing his mind to do its job. Trauma specialist, six years on the job, two at this hospital, lived in the west end, happy marriage, gay. His eyes flickered. Cat. Tortoiseshell coloring. Another flick. Fisherman. Fly fisherman, to be exact. With a feeling of relief, he let his eyes fall shut again.

Brain was fine.

"No, Mr. Holmes, stay with us," the man said, and Sherlock grimaced at him.

This thing in his throat hurt, and he reached up, his fingers fumbling, at the mask, the tube inserted in his mouth, his hand finding the taped edges and pulling before either of them could do anything about it.

"No, wait, stop-" The nurse was squeaky and annoying, and he shoved her hand away, panic blooming in his chest like a wave of pain. She twisted around, calling for an orderly, and Sherlock reared up, kicking at the bedding and yanking his arm away from the IV stand, almost unsetting the needle in his arm.

Memory and panic and where was he, and what was he doing here, and where the hell was John? The Doctor was trying to grab him, and he wasn't having anything of that, and something crashed to the floor with a metallic bang. He was trying to talk, through the thing in his throat, around it, and it was impossible, and he wanted his voice back, now.

Wrenching one arm out of the doctor's grip, he reached for the tube, and a strong hand grabbed his wrist.

"That is enough," John said, and Sherlock's head jerked around, his eyes finding John's, and okay, it was okay, he wasn't...

He wasn't alone.

John was breathing hard, his face pink with exertion, his jacket thrown over his shoulders. He met Sherlock's eyes, frowning beneath the beetled brows. "That is quite enough," he said, and it was softer now. His fingers flexed on Sherlock's wrist, pulling his arm down. "Do you understand me? Nod if you can understand me." Sherlock nodded, and he grinned. "All this fuss," he said, and there was affection there in the scolding words. "For heaven's sake, Sherlock."

"Thank you," the doctor said, as Sherlock relaxed back to the bed.

"My fault." John shifted his grip to Sherlock's hand, giving it a reassuring squeeze. "I shouldn't have left." Sherlock glanced at him, he looked tired and battered, dark circles under his eyes and his hair disordered. "I just wanted a cup of coffee," he told Sherlock.

Yes, that sounded good.

The doctor was leaning over him, and Sherlock spared him a moment and a glare, making the man laugh. "Why am I dreading taking the tube out?" he said to Sherlock.

"Leave it in. He's so much more pleasant when he can't talk." John gave him an innocent look when Sherlock moved his glare in his direction.

"Unfortunately, vitals look good, breathing's regular, blood tox came back clean, so we've got no excuse to keep it in." He peeled the tape away from Sherlock's face. "I need you to take a deep breath in through your nose, and when I say go, push it out through your mouth, as hard as you can." Sherlock nodded. "Ready? Go."

The tube came out and Sherlock coughed and gagged, his shoulders bucking with the force of it. John's hand tightened on his and he slumped back to the pillows. "Don't ever do that again," Sherlock gritted out, his voice raw and raspy.

"What, intubate you? If you need it, you're getting it. Do your best not to need it, and we won't have to," John told him.

"What happened?"

John nodded at the doctor and the nurse, who was checking Sherlock's IV and noting his chart. He waited for both of them to finish and leave before he turned back to Sherlock. "What, last week? Let me see. As far as I know, you made full use of your texting plan, destroyed the wall of a museum, insulted a single mother on a budget, became a viral YouTube sensation, got us banned from the nearest market, involved a minor in a dangerous experiment that included radioactive material, got into a bar brawl in a hospital waiting room, won, got three stitches in your hand, stole a corpse, got into a fight with an ambulance, lost, suffered blunt force head trauma, nearly drowned, and, oh, yes, gained a Facebook fan page dedicated to your hair." John's lips quirked. "Busy week, even for you."

"I know what happened to me," Sherlock said impatiently, grimacing. "What happened to you?"

John's eyebrows arched. "I solved my case, saved some lives and got home right on time," he said, his voice mild.

"And you got shot." It was a supposition, an educated guess, but John flinched, just the tiniest tick. It was enough for Sherlock to know he was right, and the rage was sudden and surprising. "You got shot again, I knew that-"

"I didn't get shot," John said calmly.

"Take your coat off."

"I'm fine."

Sherlock struggled upright, his free hand grabbing for the metal rail on the side of the bed, and John sighed. "Fine, stop it before you hurt yourself." He let go of Sherlock's hand and leaned forward, shrugging the coat back off of his shoulders. His left arm was splinted tightly against his chest. He sat back with a sigh. "I wasn't shot. The body armor stopped the bullet, just the way it was supposed to, but it hit in a bad place. Broke my collarbone."

Sherlock's vision went gray at the edges, and for an instant, he felt dizzy, unstable, and then John's hand was there, on his shoulder, pushing him back against the pillows. Sherlock collapsed back, sucking in air through his teeth, too fast and too hard for his raw throat. "How," he gasped out, "is that not shot?"

"Didn't break the skin," John said, grinning.

"If someone points a gun at you and discharges a bullet, which makes contact with you," Sherlock snapped, "then you've been shot."

"If you're going to be pedantic about it, which, let's face it, you always are." John's hand lifted from his chest, and Sherlock realized, a bit too late, that he'd made a mistake, because now John's hand wasn't holding his, and he had no excuse to get it back.

Moreover, John was looking at him with the most curious expression on his face. Sherlock frowned. "I told you-"

John held up his right hand. "Don't even begin trying to lecture me," he said, shaking his head. "I came through this week better off than you." His eyes narrowing, he stood and reclaimed Sherlock's chart from the end of his bed. "Massive trauma to the body and head, you were unconscious before you went over the side of the bridge, which means you were out when you hit the water. If Lestrade hadn't been right on your heels, you would've drowned, Sherlock." He glared over the top of the chart. "Jesus, I can't leave you alone for a bloody minute, can I?"

"No, you can't, so don't do it again."

John dipped his head forward, his shoulders tensing up, and Sherlock froze for a second, just a second, until he realized John was struggling not to laugh. The impulse under control, John looked back up at him, shaking his head. "You," he said, his voice warm and comfortable and so familiar that it made Sherlock's chest ache, "are incorrigible."

Sherlock grinned at him, until a terrifying thought struck. "Wait, did you say that Lestrade-"

"Saved your worthless life? Why, yes. Yes, he did. Went in after you without a flinch." John settled back in his chair with a faint sigh. "Says we owe him a drink, because he's sure he's going to catch his death of cold."

"I shall never hear the end of it," Sherlock said, horror dawning in his voice. "He'll lord that over me for the rest of my life."

"Yes. That's true."

"You could at least pretend to be reassuring about this," Sherlock said, trying for a glare and failing. It wasn't worth the effort.

"Since when have you been interested in false hope?" John asked, just as the door opened. He glanced over as Mycroft swept in. "All set?"

"As much as my limited abilities can produce." Mycroft gave Sherlock a faint smile. "And how are we feeling?"

Sherlock didn't dignify that with a response. "I am ready to go home."

"No, you're not," John said, before Mycroft could open his mouth. "Between the water in your lungs and probable concussion, you're staying under medical observation tonight."

"Fine. You're a doctor, observe me. At home." Gritting his teeth, Sherlock sat up, struggling to push himself to the edge of the bed.

"Sherlock," John said, sighing. "I really need you to stay here tonight. It's important that you're properly monitored to make sure that-"

"I am going home, the rest of you can do as you'd like," Sherlock said, twisting on the bed to get his legs over the side.

"John isn't well enough to take care of you tonight," Mycroft said, his voice blunt. "If you won't show a modicum of intelligence for your own health, I would hope you'd consider his."

Sherlock froze, his eyes coming up to meet John's. John gave him a faint smile. "I'm tired," he admitted, and Sherlock didn't know if it was true, or if John was manipulating him. "And if you would just stay here tonight, it would be a relief."

His shoulders slumping, Sherlock sighed. "One night."

"One night," Mycroft agreed.

"Unless you show signs of infection tomorrow," John said.

It was impossible to avoid the thought that they were ganging up on him. "John," he whined, and John reached out to push on his shoulder with a grin.

"Lie down, Sherlock, and maybe Mycroft'll get you a cup of tea."

"I believe I can do that," Mycroft agreed. "A nice herbal blend." Ignoring Sherlock's disgusted face, he headed for the door. "Anything for you, John?"

"Ah, no." John rubbed a hand over his face. "No. I'm fine."

With a nod and a faint smile, Mycroft slid out of the room, shutting the door behind him. John shifted in his chair, looking for a comfortable position and not finding one. Sherlock felt a stab of guilt, and he ignored it, he ignored it because even though he should tell John to go home, he didn't want to be alone again, he didn't want the silence and the nothing, and the... Alone.

And in the end, he was selfish and cruel and wanted what he wanted. He closed his eyes, misery sinking into his bones.

There was a faint brush of fingers against his forehead, and he opened his eyes to find John leaning over him, his expression concerned. Sherlock managed a tight lipped smile, but John didn't return it. "What's wrong?" he asked instead, his voice filled with a kindness that made Sherlock ache. "Are you in pain?"

"No," Sherlock said, and regretted it when John took his hand away. "You need to sleep." John waved him off, despite the lines of exhaustion carved in his face and the dark shadows under his eyes.

"I'm fine, Sherlock, really." He gave Sherlock a look. "It's just been a long day. You scared he hell out of me."

Sherlock managed a slight smile. "That wasn't my intent."

"It never is, and yet, that's often the result." John rubbed a hand over his face. His face hidden from view, he repeated, "You scared the hell out of me," and this time, his voice shook, just a little, but enough. Enough to drive the guilt even further into Sherlock's psyche.

Guilt wasn't a feeling he enjoyed, and Sherlock shifted on the bed. "I'm... Sorry."

John dropped his hand, looking in Sherlock's direction. "You're sorry you got caught," he said, with a ghost of a smile. "Let me see your hand."

Sherlock offered him the wrapped palm, and John went to work on the gauze bandage. He checked the stitches with a critical eye, and Sherlock let his head fall back, his hand held securely in John's. "I blame you, actually," he said, trying for arch superiority.

"Oh, you would, you rotter." John glanced at him, one eyebrow rising. "I'm kind of curious to hear what kind of twisted logic you're going to attempt now."

"If you were around, I wouldn't have-"

"Let's stop with your horrible, horrible lies right now," John said, lips twitching. "You most certainly would've, and I would've been behind you, yelling and waving my arms like a lunatic in a vain attempt to slow you down."

"I listen!" Sherlock said, stung.

"You listen. Sometimes. When you feel like it." John started to rewrap Sherlock's injured palm, taking his time and struggling a bit due to his one-handed attempts. Sherlock took over for him at the end.

John slumped back, rubbing his forehead as if it hurt. "It looks good. So does the rest of your chart. Full recovery, if you don't make this worse. Who am I kidding, you're going to make this worse, somehow."

I'm fine, he wanted to say. I got along without you, you know that, right? I can cope. I am fine on my own. He opened his mouth, the script prepared, and instead, he heard himself saying, "Did you miss me?"

John sighed. "Oh, for heaven's sake, Sherlock, don't be stupid."

The pain was sudden and stunning. Humiliation had a physical taste, a metallic, bitter tang in the back of the throat, like the burn of acid. After a lifetime of humiliations, Sherlock felt he should be used to it, to that way that his throat tightened, preventing him from swallowing or breathing, and it was worse now, even worse than when he was a child, and had no defenses against the sudden, staggering feeling of rejection.

It was so much worse, because it was John.

It was something to be borne, he supposed, and he could've done that so much better if he wasn't trapped here, trapped by the fact that he was an IDIOT, he'd tricked everyone around him into thinking otherwise, and wasn't that his greatest accomplishment, but there were people with an IQ half of his that were able to not get hit by cars, that was not something to brag about, that he couldn't take care of himself and he couldn't cope, and he was lying here, trapped, and that ache beneath his breastbone felt like a heart attack now, it wouldn't go away, and it should've, because John was back, and shouldn't that have fixed-

"Sherlock?"

His head snapped around, meeting John's eyes, and it was the proudest moment of his goddamn failure of a life that he didn't flinch, didn't curl into a ball and make embarrassing sounds of pain or loss or Jesus, for once in his broken life, could he please just be normal? "Yes?"

John sighed. "This is what I mean. About the listening. You ask questions, and then you don't even bother listening to the answers. Did you even hear me?"

"Hear what?" Sherlock arched his eyebrows.

That earned him an eye roll. "I said, 'Don't be stupid, Sherlock. Of course I did.'" John's smile was normal, familiar, and his hand was back on Sherlock's forehead, stroking, and the gesture had none of the awkwardness that Sherlock was expecting, it was just...

John.

And just like, that, everything was okay. Because it was John. Always John.

It was possible that the burn in his eyes was visible, because John's smile died. "Sherlock?"

"I missed you," Sherlock said, and tried to pretend it didn't sound like the words were ripped out of him. He cleared his throat. "I can't..." He swallowed, once, twice, and the second time he coughed, and wasn't surprised when John turned away from him. He was surprised when John turned back an instant later, guiding a straw to Sherlock's lips.

The water helped, and he gulped at it until John took it away. "Don't make yourself sick."

"I can't cope alone any more," Sherlock said, as John put the cup down, and John's head came up, concern on his face. "I used to be able to. Now I can't." His face twisted, and his eyes burned, and he turned his head away, frustrated.

John just sat there, quiet and still and, well, John. "Explain," he said at last.

Sherlock glanced over at him, and John arched an eyebrow. "I need more data," he said, his lips twitching. "So explain what you mean. You can't cope? Without me? Cope with what?"

He'd been so secretive, for so long. Why bother talking, if no one bothers to listen? Why bother explaining yourself, if no one understands? Why bother, at all.

Except, John always understood. Didn't he?

"I spent all my time dealing with trivialities," he gritted out. "Everything takes so much effort, so much-" He made an incoherant sound. "I got arrested just trying to buy milk! I couldn't make anyone do what they were supposed to do, couldn't make them understand, couldn't do anything, because there was so many things that you do, and I couldn't do any of them, it was just..."

His fingers curled into fists. "I lived my whole life on my own, up until you moved in-" Something shifted in John's face, something horrible and pained and empty, and Sherlock ignored it through ease of long practice. "I was alone, I was always alone, and I was fine, and you left, and everything was horrible, was just intolerable, and I used to be able to cope!" he yelled.

John waited until he finished, his brow wrinkling as he absorbed the information. "So," he said, at last, "your only reason to have me around is to do the shopping and talk to people."

Sherlock opened his mouth, closed it. "No."

"That's pretty much what I got out of your explanation," John said.

"No, it's not-" Sherlock's mouth twisted. "You're missing the point!"

"Okay," John said, easily. "What's your point?"

"It wasn't like this before," Sherlock burst out. "I didn't-" He sucked in a breath. "You left, and I was completely at sea, everything is a frustration now, everything's so-" He couldn't even find the words, his hands coming into fists. "It wasn't like this. Not before."

"Before, you didn't bother trying," John said, and Sherlock froze, the data falling into place with the finality of a completed experiment. His head jerked towards John, eyes blinking rapidly, and John smiled. "You didn't bother trying," John repeated, "and I don't know why, maybe because you didn't care, or didn't think it was worth it, or, I don't know, Sherlock. But before, you wouldn't have tried. Now, you tried. You gave it your best shot, and it didn't go so well, I know, but you tried. You did the best you could, and that's-" He grinned. "I'm really proud of you, Sherlock."

Sherlock stared at him. "I am not a child, to be manipulated by a golden star and a bright red A written on my charts," he snapped, and he knew it was a lie even as the words were coming out of his mouth; worse still, John knew it was a lie, too, because he rolled himself to his feet, fetched Sherlock's chart, and, fishing a pen out of his jacket pocket, did just that.

"It's not red, but I think it works." He held it up towards Sherlock. "A for effort, C- for nearly dying. Different classes, different marks."

"You're mocking me," Sherlock said, slumping low, but there was a warmth there, warm and safe and pathetically proud. It _was _pathetic, he knew it was. Knowing that didn't stop him from basking in the approval.

"Not in the least." John put the chart aside. "Sherlock, I realized something this week. I spent the last few days with your voice in the back of my head. Poking and nudging and scolding me into doing things differently than I would've, before I met you.

"You weren't there, but you were, because I knew what you'd do. What you'd have me do. I'm not going to say that I did things exactly the way you would've, I'm not you, I'll never be you, I'll never have your genius. But knowing you..." He paused, sighed.

"Sherlock, I'm not the same person I was before I met you. You changed me. Made me, if not better, than different. And I like the person I've become because of you. Even if I could, I wouldn't go back to being the person I used to be." His right hand, his only good hand right now, because he couldn't use his left, because he'd been shot, and Sherlock shuddered, his whole body shook, even as John's hand, warm and comforting and alive, touched his hair. "Maybe that's the way to think about it. Do you want to go back to being the person you were before you knew me, Sherlock?"

He'd been controlled then. No one bothered him or made him do things that he hated, awkward uncomfortable painful things, no one made him eat or made him wear lab goggles or took his cigarettes out into a snow bank and stomped up and down on them in a fit of pique. No one moved his things or brought home a stack of staff paper when his whole supply got ruined by a poorly placed cup of coffee, without even being asked.

No one complained about body parts in the fridge and ran interference with Donovan or organized his books and disorganized his papers. No one made him do dishes or do laundry or balance his checkbook or say hello to the annoying twit who ran the newsstand every morning, really, was it necessary to do it every morning, couldn't yesterday's hello just carry over to today as well?

No one made him answer Mycroft's calls or stop texting reporters at Lestrade's press conferences, no one harassed him about his sock index or made him breakfast or let him sit a little too close on the couch. No one complimented his violin playing or defended him or, strangely enough, bragged about him.

It had been comfortable. Familiar. Easy. He'd learned what he could and couldn't do, how to control his environment, how to minimize the unpleasantness that accompanied the rest of life. He'd been fine with it.

Mostly because he thought that his natural state was one of isolation. It was certainly easier. But it was also, well, lonely.

"No," he said at last. "No, I don't want to go back to that." And it was the truth; the thought was depressing, like a weight, like a recently discovered phobia he hadn't even known existed. He took a deep breath. "I'm not good at most of this."

"No one is," John said.

"You are."

John shrugged. "Honestly, Sherlock? It's easier for me to do it, because you need me to." He grinned, despite the exhaustion in his eyes. "In the land of the blind men, the one eyed man is king, after all. I'm just less socially awkward than you."

"I am not socially awkward," Sherlock said.

"I'm not even going to dignify that with a response, Sherlock."

"That is unkind," Sherlock said, but his mouth twitched into a smile.

"I'm known for that," John said. He smiled. "I was lonely, too."

"You were not," Sherlock said, hearing the pout in his words.

"Yes, I was. I was pathetically happy to get your email. Your texts, not so much. Your texts are a pain in the ass, Mr. Holmes."

"Short form verse," Sherlock corrected.

"Thank you, e. e. bloody cummings." Laughing, John patted his pocket, an involuntary tic, checking on his mobile. "I did like reading about the museum case."

"Did you?" Sherlock perked up, the way he always did, the momentary rush of John's approval enough to cheer him up, no matter what else was happening. "What'd you think?"

"Brilliant. As always." John gave him a look. "Though I do wonder why you didn't just slide the wall open and get the icon out the same way the guard put it in, as opposed to smashing through it with a crowbar."

"How often do I get to swing a crowbar at Anderson and not get arrested?" Sherlock said with a shrug, even though it made his entire body hurt.

"Good job with only getting arrested once, by the way."

"I thought that was well done of me," Sherlock agreed. "Though I do think it was unfair that I was arrested at all."

"I'm surprised you weren't tased."

"It's happened."

"And _that_ does not surprise me. Color me not at all surprised," John said, yawning. He shifted again, trying to find a better position on the chair, and it wasn't going to work. They simply weren't built for a grown man to sleep in, at least not one with a fully functional spine.

Sherlock tried to ignore the gnawing sense of guilt, and failed.

"You should go," he said, at last. "That's not comfortable."

John waved his good hand in Sherlock's direction. "Thanks, but I've slept in worse places."

"Not with a broken collarbone." Sherlock studied him in the low light of the lamp. "You should go." The words were pulled from him with actual effort, and he hated them. Hated saying them, hated that John should follow them.

John heaved a faint sigh, trying to twist so he could rest his head on the back of the seat. It wasn't going to work. "No, thanks."

"John-"

"I can't," John said, and his voice was stark and thin. "You scared me. I'm not quite over that yet. So, yeah, I know you're fine, intellectually, I know you're fine, I can see that, but I'm not-" He swallowed, and when he glanced away, his eyes glittered with moisture, just for a second, before he blinked it away. "I'm not willing to leave you alone tonight. So just, I don't know, find some way to cope with that."

Sherlock paused, and the words were coiled somewhere deep inside his head already, where he could cling to them later. "Okay," he said at last. "But you can't sleep in that chair." Maybe Mycroft could find him a cot somewhere. Sherlock struggled up into a sitting position. Hell, with what Mycroft owed them, he could damn well go out and buy a bloody cot, if that's what it took.

"Well, if I can't leave and I can't sleep in the chair, and I need to sleep, that doesn't leave much by way of choices," John pointed out, his voice not shaking quite so much now. He toed off his shoes and stood. "Move over."

"What?" Sherlock blinked up at him.

"You heard me, move your beanpole self over. I'm tired, and you're tired, and thanks to Mycroft getting you a private room, you've got the only bed." He grinned at Sherlock. "Move over, you selfish git."

And Sherlock was confused enough, and relieved enough that he wasn't leaving that he did it, moving as far over on the hospital bed as he could get. John boosted himself up on the other side, his right shoulder against Sherlock's left. For a moment, they both lay there, balancing as best they could on the narrow bed, and then John started to laugh. It was quiet, uneven at first, building into an almost painful sounding guffaw.

Sherlock looked at him, confused, and John met his eyes, nearly crying with the force of his laughter. "Oh, God, this is the worst idea I've ever had," he gasped out. "This is not going to work at all, my God, I'm losing my bloody mind." Laughing, he groped for the edge of the bed, but it was awkward, having to reach across his body with his good hand, and he winced, but he was still laughing, and Sherlock realized, with a start, that he was getting up.

Without even thinking about it, he rolled onto his side, pushing closer and letting his head fall against John's shoulder.

They both froze for a second, and then John shifted back. "Sherlock?"

"It's fine," Sherlock managed. His heart was pounding, and the angle pulled hard on his IV, but he didn't want to be alone. "It's fine. Isn't it?"

John paused, and sucked in a long breath, and Sherlock could hear it, his cheek against John's shoulder, and then, John's quiet, almost mumbled, "You must be drugged out of your mind."

"Mmm. Drugs," Sherlock agreed, and sure, that was fine, whatever, as long as John stayed where he was.

Another pause, stretching out in painful degrees. John shifted, twisting and pushing himself farther up on the pillows, and Sherlock resisted the urge to grab hold of his shirt and cling. "Lift your head," John said, and when he did, John shifted his body, sliding his good arm under Sherlock's head. "There."

Cautious, a little fearful, Sherlock lowered his head back down, and found that it fell naturally in the hollow of John's shoulder, against his chest, and it was fine. He wiggled closer, and it was better than fine. John turned his head, just a little, and Sherlock felt the faint brush of his breath in his hair, and he relaxed, for the first time in more than a week.

Yes, this was just fine.

He yawned, exhaustion overtaking him, and he almost, almost managed to stop himself from resting a hand on John's chest, right next to his face, but he didn't. And John didn't object, so that was fine, too. He closed his eyes and let the exhaustion sweep over him.

A thought occurred to him, and Sherlock stirred. "Wait, did you say something about a Facebook fan page?"

"For your hair." He heard, rather than saw, John's yawn. "I am not asking questions. I am avoiding it at all costs. But there it is."

"Who would-"

"More than fourteen hundred fans when I stumbled across it. Apparently, your hair is quite popular."

"For God's sake, why?"

"That is one of the enduring questions of our time." John chuckled, and it stirred Sherlock's hair, and he shivered. "Cold?"

"No." Sherlock closed his eyes, deciding that he could think about that more tomorrow. Or later. Sometime later. Much later. For now, he was just going to close his eyes, and stay here, safe and warm and appreciate that the ache in his chest was finally gone.

* * *

When he walked in with a cup of tea, Mycroft wasn't surprised to find them both asleep. The position in which he found them raised both eyebrows an alarming degree, but with a faint sigh, he pulled the door shut behind him. "This co-dependancy," he announced to the unconscious duo, "is reaching laughable levels."

But he said it so softly that neither of them so much as stirred. Which was, after all, just the way he wanted it.

Shaking his head, he opened the closet. Picking up the folded blanket that was on the single shelf, he unfolded it with a flick of his wrists. He covered them both, pulling the blanket up as far as he could on Sherlock's shoulders. His brother muttered under his breath, and snuggled down, his chin tucking in in a childlike gesture.

Mycroft paused for just an instant, his hand ghosting over Sherlock's disordered curls. "For heaven's sake," he whispered, hoping that it registered on some subliminal level, "would the two of you please just sleep together? This denial nonsense is becoming tedious, and it's unbecoming of you."

Sherlock grumbled in his sleep, one hand coming up to rest on John's chest, and John turned his head, just a bit, rubbing his cheek against Sherlock's hair.

"Pathetic," Mycroft said, his eyes flicking up towards the ceiling. It was an eye roll without the effort, a gesture he employed often enough around his younger sibling. Still, there was a faint smile on his lips as he left the room, turning off the light as he went.

The guard he'd stationed outside gave him a respectful nod, and handed over his attache case and umbrella. Mycroft took them both with a murmured thank you. At the nurse's station, he picked up the paperwork that was waiting for him and he continued up the corridor.

He rapped his knuckles against the door and opened it. Greg Lestrade looked up from the hospital tray table, which currently held a stack of paperwork. "It is way too late to deal with you. Aren't visiting hours over?"

"Not for family," Mycroft said with a saccharine smile.

Lestrade stabbed a finger in his direction. "See, that thing? That thing you do, that is creepy. I cannot tell you how creepy it is, there are no words." He was fully dressed and sitting on top of the covers, his shoes next to the bed and his hair disordered. Mycroft wondered which of his underlings had brought him the paperwork; it was against his doctor's orders.

The fact that the doctor got his orders from Mycroft was another thing entirely. He thought it best not to bring that up.

"I'm hurt." Mycroft said, taking a seat in the visitor's chair. "And after I went through all the trouble to get you discharged now, well after the usual hours." He held up the file with one languid hand. "But if you'd prefer to stay the night..."

Lestrade had already grabbed the folder. "Thank you. And you are not my next of kin, so I am not asking how you got this done."

"Actually, I have paperwork that says otherwise," Mycroft said with a wide smile.

"Creepy. So bloody creepy. I need you to stop doing that." Rolling his eyes, Lestrade pushed the tray table out of the way and swung his legs off the side of the bed. He jammed his feet into his shoes and stacked up his files.

Mycroft picked up the top folder and glanced at the contents. "Stop doing what?"

"Being creepy."

"I really have no idea what you're talking about. I am merely attempting to assist you. It seems the least I can do, after all the trouble Sherlock has caused you."

Lestrade took his folder back and snapped it shut. "Yeah, this week has been hell. You send John Watson off again, and I am taking emergency leave. You are on your own. Sherlock has been a nightmare to deal with, you know that? Two cases, an arrest, two hospital visits, and I swear I've got an ulcer. Plus, between Donovan and Anderson, I'm going to have to carve out time for another session of sensitivity training, and that always goes so well."

"Mouthful of bees?" Mycroft asked, arching an eyebrow.

He collected his jacket from the other visitor chair and shrugged into it. "So many goddamn angry bees, I am not kidding. I've got my dignity to consider, and I've stripped down twice in public this week."

"I'm so sorry I missed that."

"Creepy," Lestrade told him with a flat look, and Mycroft had to work at not laughing.

He cleared his throat. "Yes, well, there's a car waiting, if you'd care to get a ride home."

"Cheaper than a cab." Collecting his work, he fell into step with Mycroft. "More likely to end with me dead in a ditch, but you're going to have me killed at some point. No point in putting it off, if my file's already been stamped."

"Such paranoia doesn't become you, Greg." Mycroft's lips twitched, just a bit, at the corners. "Don't be concerned. Saving Sherlock from drowning bought you at least a few more weeks of continued survival."

"Wonderful." He glanced at Mycroft, amusement in his eyes. "How is the hard-headed lug?"

"Exceptionally cranky. Did Dr. Watson stop in to see you?"

"You know he did. Not for long, but I was glad to see him." Greg chuckled under his breath as they waited for the elevator. "So glad to see him."

"It has been a trying week." Mycroft rubbed his forehead, his umbrella hanging on his elbow. "And judging by the reports I've begun to receive from his trip, I will be doing damage control for some time."

Lestrade gave him a look. "How bad."

"Let's just say, I will need to sit Dr. Watson down come to an accord as to just how much we'll be telling Sherlock. Everything came out right in the end, there's really no call to panic him at this juncture." Mycroft felt the little twitch by his eye, a muscle pull that he couldn't quite suppress, and he pressed a finger there. "It would be inadvisable."

"Oh, THAT bad. Wonderful." Greg held up a hand, forestalling any additional information. "I really do not want to know. Not at all. I'd prefer to maintain plausible deniability."

"That is a wise choice." Mycroft grinned at him. The trip through the hospital didn't take long, and Lestrade was silent for a time.

"You know this is your fault," he said at last.

Mycroft nodded. "Yes," he said, his voice betraying some element of his mental state, and he pulled himself together. "It always is. It's an impossible situation. But yes. I am left only with a sea of paper. Of notifications that come too late, and reports that cover the aftermath, and it is always left to the two of them to protect themselves. I am, after all, worse than helpless."

Lestrade glanced at him, pausing at the hospital's main door. His hand on the handle, he studied Mycroft. "Neither of them would accept full time bodyguards, even if you could get the expense approved." When Mycroft's lips curled up, he groaned. "Of course you could get it approved. But they wouldn't have it."

"No. They wouldn't. Which leaves me as a distant observer, waiting and-" He gave a faint shrug. "Paperwork. What can I do from a distance, Detective Inspector?"

Lestrade smiled. "Clean up the mess in the end."

"That, I excel at. I am a glorified janitor," Mycroft agreed. "One without the sense to just set out traps for our most troublesome mice."

"What sort of traps would even work?"

"I lean towards snipers, but I've been told I'm excessive."

"And creepy." Lestrade opened the door. "You start posting snipers on the rooftops around Baker Street and I'm putting in for a transfer to somewhere that isn't here."

"I stand forewarned as to your intentions." Mycroft padded towards the car, swinging his umbrella. "Care for some dinner?"

"Yes. Wait, are you coming? In that case, no."

Mycroft struggled against the impulse to giggle. "That is just beneath you. Allow me to treat you as a reward for saving Sherlock."

Lestrade stopped beside the car, eyes narrowing. "Let's get one thing straight," he said after a beat of silence. "I jumped in after your loopy brother because it was him, not because you've been making my life a living hell since I met him. Despite you and your occasional bouts of creepy, I really do like Sherlock-" He paused, eyebrows snapping down. "Huh. That's not actually a lie. Whatta you know. He may be a pain in the arse, but he's our pain in the arse, Mycroft, and he is a friend of mine, and even if he wasn't, it's kinda my job."

"No," Mycroft said, arching an eyebrow. "It's your nature." He gave a faint smile. "That doesn't mean that you shouldn't be rewarded for it."

His mouth opening to retort to that, Lestrade paused. Frowned. "There's something wrong with that, but I'm too bloody tired to figure it out." He turned back to the car, and to his credit, he didn't jump or shriek upon finding that Anthea had materialized between him and the door and was holding it open with one hand. The other was on her ever present mobile. "There had better be booze, wherever we go."

"It would be my pleasure to get you, as they say, liquored up," Mycroft said with a smile.

"And there's the creepy again."

**Epilogue:**

Sherlock was bored.

That didn't mean he had any intention of answering the buzzer. There was bored and then there was bored and attempting to correct the boredom. He hadn't quite reached the latter stage yet, but the damn bell just kept ringing.

"MRS. HUDSON!" he bellowed, but she didn't reply either, and my God, what sort of complete psychotic was at their front door, anyway? Why would buzzer finger just not give up?

With a snarl, he stomped for the stairs. Stomped down the stairs. Stomped to the door. Wrenched it open. "What," he asked, his voice a good imitation of Mycroft's at his most dispassionately unpleasant. "What is it that you want."

The young man on the stoop stared at him,eyes wide and mouth parted, just the tiniest bit. Under his freckles, he seemed a little pallid, and his eyes were flickering up and down. Sherlock glanced down and realized that the bone saw was still on. He turned it off with a flick of his wrist and stood there.

Turning it off didn't seem to make much difference, now the boy was staring at the blood and bone flakes that were dripping on the welcome mat. It wasn't deliberate, but now that it had happened, Sherlock was rather pleased with the effect. Maybe that would keep random passers-by from ringing the goddamn bell.

"What is it," he snapped at the most recent abuser of their bell. "Are you selling sweets, are you collecting for charity, are you here with a case, are you lost, what is it."

His head jerked up, and to Sherlock's surprise, a faint smile curved his lips. "And to think I doubted him." When Sherlock's eyes narrowed, he pulled himself up straight. "I'm Corporal William Cooper," he explained. "I was looking for Captain Watson."

"You missed that by a few years, he's been discharged," Sherlock said, going to shut the door, but the boy was remarkably fast, getting his foot in there before he could. Sherlock glared at it.

"He saved my life just a few months ago," Cooper explained. "In Afghanistan? You're Sherlock Holmes, he told me all about you while he was there." He gave Sherlock a bright grin. "I'm home on leave, and I just wanted to stop by, see him? Say thank you?"

Sherlock's shoulders tightened, and he resisted the urge to kick the boy's foot out of the door and slam it shut. John had been remarkably close mouthed about the whole thing, and it was- He froze, his eyes going wide. "He saved your life."

"Yes."

Sherlock leaned forward. "You were there when he was shot."

Cooper had enough sense to realize he'd just wandered in over his head, and began backpedeling, both physically and verbally. "You know, if he's at the surgery, I can just come back later tonight, no reason to put yourself out-"

Sherlock grabbed him by the front of his shirt and dragged him inside. "Thank you, don't worry, comfortable living room, might as well rest there while you wait, you were injured, weren't you? Left hand side, just above the hip, slight tendon damage judging by the way you're walking, you bought that shirt yesterday, and you proposed to your girlfriend just recently, how nice, mazel tov."

"Wait, how did you-"

The front door of 221 Baker Street slammed shut with staggering finality.

**London, The Surgery:**

John was saying good-bye to a girl with a marked case of the chicken pox and her rather overworked mother when his mobile buzzed in his coat pocket. He glanced at the clock, but he was on schedule, and the day was almost over. Might as well take a second to find out what Sherlock wanted.

Retreating to his desk, he took out the phone and checked the most recent text.

'You are never allowed to go anywhere alone again. SH'

Amused, John leaned back in his chair, his fingers flying.

'Playing with chemicals without a fume hood again, Sherlock? JW'

A moment later, there was a buzz.

'Not a joke. Never. Again. SH'

John rolled his eyes.

'Go take a nap, Sherlock, you were up late. JW'

'Warned you that there would be consequences. SH'

John frowned. "Consequences?" he wondered aloud. "What is he TALKING about? What consequences? Consequences of what?"

The mobile buzzed again, and he pushed up the most recent text, not recognizing the number. 'Hi, Captain Watson, it's Cooper. In London on leave. Wanted to stop by and say hi, Sherlock is v. intense. Why is he running your passport through the paper shredder? Cooper'

John's forehead hit the desktop. After a moment, he sighed and replied:

'He can sense fear. Just sit still and nod when he starts yelling. Better yet, compliment him. I'll be home soon. JW.'

The reply from Cooper's number was almost immediate. 'This phone has been confiscated by the authority of 221B Baker St. For more details, come home. Now. Not SH'

John winced. 'Give him his phone back, Sherlock. JW'

'No. You got kidnapped AGAIN. Absolutely not SH'

John rolled his eyes. 'I went to rescue my assistant. I learned from the best. JW'

There was a significant pause before the reply came. 'So, you LET yourself get kidnapped. By armed military personnel. Which resulted in you getting shot. You are never leaving the flat again. Still not SH'

John closed the texting window and hit speed dial. "Hello, Mycroft? How quickly can you arrange protective custody?"

"Does this have anything to do with the fact that my other line is blinking?"

"Yeah, I wouldn't answer that, if I were you." '

END.

(Author's Note: This is the first piece I've written and finished on my own in close to ten years. I apologize for the unevenness and poor plotting. My sincere and heartfelt thanks to everyone who took the time to leave me feedback, corrections and pointed out plot holes. Without it, I doubt I'd have had the courage to keep posting. Thank you! )


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